• Planning for retrofit of retirement communities

    Continuing care retirement communities are a huge industry, planned in the suburban model, often with excess land that could be better utilized in a walkable, mixed-use form.
    The 231-acre Aldersgate campus in Charlotte, North Carolina, is one of 1,900 continuing care retirement communities (CCRCs) in the US. Like most CCRCs, Aldersgate is set back from the surrounding city, planned in the single-use suburban model. More than 70 years after the development broke ground...Read more
  • Historic shopping mall site slated for mixed-use

    A major shopping mall that influenced 20 th Century retail is slated to become a mixed-use urban center after getting key State of Michigan approvals in late July. Designed by Victor Gruen, Northland Center in Southfield, Michigan, predated the first enclosed mall. It began as a large outdoor...Read more
  • A practical ‘landscape urbanism’ in a postwar suburb

    A centrally located former golf course becomes a new park of regional importance, through strategic development of a portion of the site.
    Meadowbrook Park doesn’t look a lot like typical New Urbanism, yet it provides usable parkland and diversity of living spaces to Prairie Village, Kansas. The surrounding neighborhoods of single-family houses, built in the 1940s and 1950s, are better for it because they previously lacked access to...Read more
  • Office park redo is a model for mixed-use

    Downtown Doral targets families, creates downtown in amorphous suburb, and avoids the blank slate.
    Downtown Doral in Dade County, Florida, shows how a 1970s business park can be become a mixed-use downtown while retaining some of the old buildings and infrastructure. The project avoids a “blank slate” approach to transforming a single-use, automobile-oriented place, that would appear to be a...Read more