• Designing gathering spaces in a car-oriented city

    A new urbanist development named after a literary hometown focuses on the arts and much-needed public space.
    Newport News, Virginia, is a city of 186,000 people where downtown is hard to find. The area that Google identifies as the heart of Newport News is an office/industrial park. The traditional center at the city's south end, on the James River waterfront, primarily consists of parking lots and single...Read more

  • Why we need to design community into neighborhoods

    The author of Fragile Neighborhoods urges urban planners to take on a vital domestic challenge: Help restore the social function of neighborhoods.
    Improving the physical design of the built environment is not enough, argues author Seth Kaplan. He contends that healthy communities need formal and informal institutions that promote social interaction for humans to thrive. “We can’t just build with a vision of the built environment; we need a...Read more

  • Protect the porch

    The porch is more than just another single-family architectural feature, it's an important part of the culture of Black neighborhoods.
    As a young black man growing up dually in the urban oasis of Memphis and the countryside of Bells, Tennessee, I repeatedly encountered an architectural element in both places: the porch. My maternal grandmother was a front porch person; she enjoyed the street-watching (she didn't know who Jane...Read more

  • From unsafe arterial to thriving main street

    CNU and affiliated designers work with a community to identify implementation solutions for a disinvested urban corridor west of Charlotte’s Center City.
    Currently, West Boulevard in Charlotte is anything but a safe and comfortable walk. A narrow sidewalk directly abuts travel lanes where traffic goes 50 miles per hour. There are no street trees or parked cars to buffer pedestrians. Those on foot sense constant danger. The alternative vision is a...Read more