• The 15-minute city is the new 5-minute walk

    Proximity and human-scale are still vitally important for sustainability, and yet the geography of our lives has gotten bigger. That is why we need the 15-minute city.
    Why is the 15-minute city important? The 15-minute city is to the 21st Century what the 5-minute walk was to the 19th and early 20th centuries. I realized this after reading a history of my neighborhood, Fall Creek in Ithaca, New York . Because the neighborhood hasn’t physically changed that much...Read more

  • Plight of the family-owned store

    Philip Langdon’s Common\Edge article , The Precarious State of the Mom-and-Pop Store , highlights the beauty of, and challenges facing, an American tradition. “Mom and pop” stores have been under economic pressure for many decades due to suburbanization and the proliferation of national chains. The...Read more

  • The college campus to New Urbanist pipeline

    American college campuses play a major role in young people coming to understand the importance of walkability and bikeability in their communities. For many, living on a college campus is the first time they truly live somewhere with adequate and safe pedestrian infrastructure with services...Read more

  • Thanksgiving and the magic of community

    This holiday is about places and people and memory, and that has an impact on how we build and experience cities and towns.
    To me, Thanksgiving smells of cool gray skies, bare trees, decaying leaves, and an old town in Connecticut. That’s where we spent many Thanksgivings when I was a child—at the 19 th Century house of an aunt and uncle. We always went for a walk—several walks—the older and younger ones together with...Read more