• Creating local craft

    The workers at Caribbean Homes and Exports are not only doing meaningful work, but they also command far more value than if they were at the bottom links of the industrial product chain.
    We have become so accustomed to buying things manufactured halfway around the world at everyday low prices that most of us have forgotten the delight of things created by local craftsmen steeped in traditions they have developed over time. These are things you can’t find just anywhere, and the...Read more

  • 25 great ideas of the New Urbanism

    The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have...Read more

  • Supersized Happy Meal houses

    The first step to good design is avoiding the bad, says Kate Wagner. Why not start with shutter crimes, poor proportions, and clashing architectural references?
    Kate Wagner is snarky, sarcastic, and full of contempt. But she's funny, so is her website McMansion Hell , and she knows a lot about urbanism and architecture. And she has a larger purpose of design education through relentless criticism of America's ugliest houses—McMansions. Wagner has tapped a...Read more

  • The 5 'Cs' of community planning

    Complete, compact, connected, complex, and convivial describes everything that you want a neighborhood to be.
    The source of most conflicts and confusion I see occurring when cities update their Community Plans is due to the confusion over the scale and size difference of a ‘Community’ versus a ‘Neighborhood’ unit. A community is defined as, “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular...Read more