• The magic of inner-block development

    The opportunities are vast to create human-scale places on the inside of urban blocks, according to a discussion on CNU's On the Park Bench.
    The most photographed street in the US is Acorn Street, in Boston, a little mid-block residential thoroughfare in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. The reason why Acorn—along with similar streets like Elfreth’s Alley in Philadelphia—is so popular, is because of its human scale, according to architect...Read more

  • Traboules: Magic block-penetrating passages

    The City of Lyon, France, has several discreet covered passageways known as Traboules . They can also be found in a few other French cities such as Villefranche-sur-Saône, Mâcon, Saint-Étienne, along with several in Chambéry. The Lyon passageways are found in the historic 1st Arrondissement, and...Read more

  • New Urbanism on the Moon

    The architecture of community will be important in space, because you not only have to keep people alive, but happy and healthy—and you do that through sense of community.
    Hilton Hotels famously planned a hotel on the Moon back in the 1960s, when outer space fever was at a high pitch. These plans were obviously never realized and nobody has gone back to the Moon since 1972, but now space ambitions have surged again, and there has even been talk of space settlements...Read more

  • Making a new urbanist of me

    Great places have the ability to inspire, and Seaside changed my life from building wide, fast roads to analyzing and documenting the DNA of places.
    The first time I visited Seaside, I knew very little about traditional neighborhood development. The trip was a vacation with 10 family members, including my parents. We made ourselves quite comfortable in an amazing home designed and owned by Robert Orr, called the Old Natchez Compound, which...Read more