• Small city invests in downtown

    With a new urban vision and context-based street design, Olean has taken a bold step to revive its economy and social life.
    Olean, a small city in isolated southwestern New York State, has transformed its wide main street, North Union Street, using five roundabouts and a new tree-lined center median to calm traffic and shorten pedestrian crossing distances. Four lanes of traffic were reduced to two and several traffic...Read more

  • ‘Aging with grace’: The next big challenge for urbanists

    Designing and establishing systems for walkable communities that support aging residents are important planning and development tasks for the coming decades.
    In late October, experts gathered in Seaside, Florida, to confront one of the greatest demographic issues of our times: the aging of the American population. With the Baby Boom soon to become the Elder Boom, Seaside founder Robert Davis concluded that New Urbanists should be figuring out how the...Read more

  • Safetyism, fragility, and community design

    Our built environment separates everything to reduce conflict and make us safe—it may instead do the opposite.
    I am reading The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, which speaks, in part, of the culture of “safetyism” that has taken hold in American discourse and higher education. The authors draw from ancient wisdom, psychological theory, and science to make the case that it...Read more

  • Overselling utopia? The urbanist’s dilemma

    Do we risk overselling smart growth, placemaking or other urbanist concepts today, without taking heed of social and market realities?
    Generally speaking, the description of any Utopia that involves many details is apt to be an unconvincing way to present a principle which can be applied effectively in practice with immense flexibility as to details … —Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. to Henry James, July 10, 1924, Papers, Regional Plan...Read more