• Enabling a diverse Southwestern county to grow and prosper

    Doña Ana County, a culturally rich but economically challenged part of New Mexico, is staking its future on walkable communities.
    The beauty of Doña Ana County, with the Organ mountains and the Rio Grande, the fields of chile and orchards of pecans, is stunning. Yet many of those who live and work in this landscape are challenged economically—almost 26 percent of the residents live in poverty, and a quarter of the population...Read more

  • The ‘Continuous City’ versus the ‘Ruptured City’

    Review of Daniel Solomon's book, Housing and the City: Love versus Hope, Schiffer Publishing, 192 pp., $45 hardcover.
    Soon after finishing Daniel Solomon’s Housing and the City: Love versus Hope , I took the train to New York and saw “Toward a Concrete Utopia”—a show at the Museum of Modern Art that celebrates the post-World War II architecture of Yugoslavia. The contrast between Solomon’s clear-eyed book and MoMA...Read more

  • Visionary code protects rural lands

    Preserving open space in a time of rising development pressure, while fostering equitable development, requires out-of-the-box thinking.
    The Rural Area Plan (RAP) for Davidson, North Carolina, uses a form-based code for aggressive rural land conservation. Sixty-five percent of the countryside is preserved over six square miles, allowing for the development of compact hamlets and villages on one-third of the area. The plan was...Read more

  • Building a healthier downtown and region

    Downtown has come back to life while the city is building a transit framework for walkable, mixed-use growth along corridors.
    The assessed value of downtown El Paso, Texas, has risen to $329 million, from $191 million in 2005, according to a February report in the El Paso Times . These values put numbers to a revival that has transformed the downtown to a destination for locals and tourists, writes Steve Ortega, a member...Read more