• Putting historic stables to new use

    The Chapman Stables housing in DC shows how sites can evolve radically, while the street-facing facade remains.
    Urban buildings and blocks transform radically over time. The Chapman Stables site on N Street NW in DC was a coal yard, stables, a garage and repair shop for Model Ts in the 1920s, a corrugated box factory, and a warehouse. The Truxton Circle neighborhood was a rough-and-tumble part of the City in...Read more

  • Model for suburban retrofit in the Inland Empire

    Rancho Cucamonga is implementing urbanism on arterial roads and suburban commercial areas. This plan is intended to lead the way to density and mixed-use in a suburban city in Southern California.
    Some experts predict the major development trend in the next 20 years will be “urbanizing the suburbs,” bringing density and mixed-use to underutilized commercial areas. If so, the Inland Empire of Southern California, with 4.6 million people, could be a test case. Rancho Cucamonga, an important...Read more

  • A vision for repairing rural sprawl

    Planning an acupunctural approach to repairing a sprawling plan from the 1950s, using urbanism principles.
    Cherokee Village is an odd and interesting community in the Ozarks of north Arkansas. In the 1950s, it was planned as a vast retirement community, platted for a population of 60,000. The road network, golf courses, and reservoirs for waterfront home sites were built, although most of the...Read more

  • A pattern language applied to a suburban strip

    A report on a workshop in Charlotte shows how Christopher Alexander’s pattern language can be expanded to improve communities.
    A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander is one of the best-selling architectural books of all time, inspiring many urbanists with ideas related to community design. Yet its land-use influence is limited by the difficulty of translating the ideas into comprehensive plans and zoning codes. Also,...Read more