• Good news, the era of sprawl is over

    That problem we’ve been having with inefficient, spread-out, unsustainable, automobile-dependent development patterns is solved at last.
    On Friday, the National Association of Sprawl Tasks and Initiatives (NASTI) met to discuss how to get closer parking spots to their meetings, only to discover that parking lots fronting power centers, commercial strip corridors, and the group's offices nationwide had magically disappeared—along...Read more

  • Call for the best form-based codes

    The submission deadline is April 5 for this year’s Driehaus Award, to be announced at CNU 27 in Louisville.
    A jury of top urban designers and planners will select this year’s Driehaus Award: highlighting a great form-based code (or codes) that has been adopted in any year in any community in the world. The award showcases what's possible with good zoning and spotlights cities and towns that are pushing...Read more

  • A new proposal for historic preservation

    Why the key question, always, is this: "Is this this an upward trade?"
    The core problem that led to the modern preservation movement had been building since early in the Great Decline (1925-1945) and boiled over midway through the Dark Ages of Architecture (1945-1980) with the destruction of Penn Station. That problem was the fact that a new building replacing an...Read more

  • A checklist of local government reform

    Here's an outline of what municipalities can do to promote walkable urban development.
    As an incremental developer, principal in an urban design and architecture firm, and an urbanist, I constantly deal with institutional barriers to walkable urban places. Here is my list of pragmatic reforms that would greatly improve land-use planning and development in municipalities across the US...Read more