• A campus opens up to the city

    A recent UConn relocation from a leafy suburban campus to downtown Hartford, Connecticut, follows wider urban trends.
    Four decades after moving its campus to suburban West Hartford, the University of Connecticut moved back to downtown Hartford—bringing mixed-use development and the revitalization of the Hartford Times Building, a neoclassical landmark. Because the suburban campus had been difficult for city-based...Read more

  • Budgeting for a fractal city: Campus design, part 5

    Most funding should go to small projects in a living city. Instead, funding is often skewed toward large projects.
    Author’s note: This is the fifth in a series of ten essays that present innovative techniques for designing and repairing a corporate or university campus. These tools combine New Urbanist principles with Alexandrian design methods. The present-day project funding formula — skewed towards the...Read more

  • Sophisticated insertion of missing middle

    A transit-accessible infill development includes a variety of housing types geared to improving the economics of urban living.
    Sited behind a historic 1880 “grand home” in the Edgewood neighborhood of Atlanta, LaFrance Walk includes a variety of missing middle housing types within walking distance of the MARTA station and a major retail center. “One of the best aspects of living in LaFrance Walk is its proximity to the...Read more

  • Seamless town extension with affordable housing

    Tregunnel Hill in Cornwall, England, proves that the principles used in Prince Charles's Poundbury are replicable.
    In the Village of Newquay a new urban neighborhood has been built with local materials and workers, trained in an apprenticeship program. Nearly 90 percent of the new residents have moved in from the immediate area, a remarkable feat in a popular resort setting. Twenty-eight percent of the units...Read more