• What good are planners if zoning disappears?

    In Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray offers a vision for a post-zoning world—including a productive shift in the planning profession.
    M. Nolan Gray has good timing with Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it , one of the top selling urban planning and development books of the year. Zoning is being challenged like never before in the century since it caught fire as a public policy. Zoning reform is...Read more

  • Buttigieg: How transportation can connect communities

    The remarks of the US Secretary of Transportation, announcing the launch of the Reconnecting Communities program in Birmingham last week, are posted below.
    On June 30, US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg journeyed to Birmingham, Alabama to announce the opening of applications for $1 billion in grants to regions, cities and non-profits to repair the scars inflicted on communities by urban highway and railroad construction. Since CNU has...Read more

  • CNU attends launch of program to reconnect communities divided by transportation projects

    Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg went to Birmingham, Alabama, Thursday to launch the DOT’s $1 billion Reconnecting Communities program. The start of the city’s Birmingham Xpress, a 10-mile bus rapid transit line that connects 25 neighborhoods, exemplifies the goals of the program—to...Read more

  • The program that ‘changed everything’ for Oklahoma City

    Thirty years ago, Oklahoma City’s downtown was hurting badly, and the city’s livability and beauty were at a low ebb. A policy called MAPs transformed the city.
    Oklahoma City (OKC) is one of the few major cities with championship-level kayaking and whitewater rafting in the middle of the city. Downtown is connected to a seven-mile-long recreational riverfront via a series of manmade “river lakes.” A new urban canal links downtown to the Bricktown...Read more