• The Arc of Engagement

    CNU recently released the Users' Guide to Zoning Reform, which offers a new path to improving land-use codes.
    The Arc of Engagement is an image from the Users' Guide to Zoning Reform , representing an incremental path toward form-coding, an important advancement in form-based codes. The term form-based code was only created 15 years ago, and this concept has already been adopted in hundreds of...Read more

  • Driving per capita is in a long-term stall

    "Normalizing for population, VMT per capita has seen zero net growth since 2002," notes a recent post from the State Smart Transportation Initiative. This reality is at odds with transportation modeling, which consistently overestimates traffic growth in projections, SSTI writes. This leads to...Read more

  • Starchitecture skyline

    You can't make a decent city solely with the kinds of buildings designed by today's big-name architects.
    "I think every city is allowed one Frank Gehry building, but could you imagine an entire city made out of Frank Gehry buildings?" says John Torti of Torti Gallas + Partners. The image above, of "starchitect" buildings assembled in a poster by starchitect Rem Koolhaas , is one way of imagining such...Read more

  • Parking lot designed as an avenue

    Parking lots are among the ugliest and most common features of the American landscape. They cost a lot of money, use tremendous land, and make much of our cities less walkable. Yet as long as we drive, we do need parking. Parking doesn't have to be ugly. There are ways to provide far more value—...Read more