• Gingerbread villages feel right for the holidays

    This wonderful gingerbread village was made in the holiday spirit recently by David M. Schwarz Architects (DMSAS). The village is based on principles of good urban planning, reports Lauren Landau for the blog DCist . “Gregory Hoss, president of DMSAS, says the residents of Gingertown don’t mind a...Read more

  • A tale of two neighborhoods

    Only two miles apart, the Baltimore neighborhoods of Park Heights and Guilford have radically different health outcomes. These two neighborhoods are divided by an Interstate highway (I-83), and were designated differently by financial (“redlining”) policies in the 1930s. The map and data come from...Read more

  • For Brooklyn: Streets instead of a highway

    As the City of New York is talking about spending $4-8 billion on rebuilding the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), a pair of new urbanists are proposing that a section of this Interstate be torn down and replaced by city streets. In a guest column for the New York Daily News , architect and urban...Read more

  • Retreats, eco-villages, and walkable communities

    A retreat is often used in real estate marketing to describe anything from a gated suburban resort subdivision to enclaves and eco-villages. Ideally, a new urbanist neo-traditional version includes the same fundamental principles of villages and neighborhoods in towns and cities—walkability,...Read more