• Why new urbanists generated great ideas

    A multidisciplinary group with potential influence on and understanding of the built environment, new urbanists were uniquely positioned to push back effectively against the status quo.
    The late urban planner Hank Dittmar writes that he “perceived a dissonance between what [he] saw and liked in cities and landscape and what was being taught in school.” Everything that Dittmar loved about cities—mixed-use, walkability, fine-grain diversity of buildings, the network of small blocks...Read more

  • The Lean side of Seaside

    The well-known Panhandle beach town offers an early case study in frugal environmental design.
    Note: This article was written as part of the Project for Lean Urbanism and edited for Public Square. Seaside, the resort town in the Florida Panhandle, is best known for being compact, walkable and diverse in uses—and one of the first environmentally designed new towns. It should also be...Read more

  • My career sowing seeds of better design

    Here are roles and strategies that I have experienced to help many others to heal a damaged built environment.
    If you want to have the most sustainable healing impact on our damaged built environment, the architectural ideal of the lone genius isn’t the best way to go about it. If you have a choice between becoming that lone creative genius yourself and helping many others do better work, then by all means...Read more

  • Urban multifamily buildings and the architecture of community

    Mid-rise residential buildings are an essential component of urbanism when they respond to context and help set the pattern of streets and blocks.
    Editor's Note: This essay appeared in Torti Gallas + Partners: Architects of Community . “Paris is so very beautiful that it satisfies something in you that is always hungry in America.” Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast “You can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.”...Read more