• The American strip is a relic

    California’s new legislation may be the catalyst for transforming America’s dying commercial strips
    “The Strip” was once the glue holding together the American Dream’s new world of subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks. It was the place to cruise, a new type of social space, lined with landmarks, trademarks and yes, gathering places. But no more. Today we do our cruising online and...Read more
  • A suburban neighborhood of tract housing within the city of Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States; culs-de-sac are hallmarks of suburban planning.

    Suburbia was a housing program

    We used to understand that housing construction was in the public interest
    Note: This article first appeared on The Deleted Scenes .​ Public Square editor Robert Steuteville is on leave through the last week of October. I’ve had this note sitting in my possible newsletter posts document: “Suburbia was a housing program.” I’ve alternated between thinking that was banal and...Read more

  • Visionary leadership creates new downtown

    Frisco, Texas, has been one of the fastest growing cities in the US over the last three decades, going from a small town of 6,000 in 1990 to more than 200,000 today. In the 1990s, when the city north of Dallas began to boom, officials acquired land for civic buildings like a city hall and police...Read more

  • 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