• 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

  • A new kind of church, in a former warehouse

    Grace Midtown Church in Atlanta, Georgia, shows how underutilized industrial sites can be repurposed into community assets. Kronberg Urbanists + Architects won a merit award in the Block, Street, and Building category of CNU's 2021 Charter Awards.
    Grace Midtown Church is a growing, young, nontraditional church that has reimagined both its worship space and how the church relates physically to the city. An unremarkable former warehouse in an industrial area was converted into a 1,000-seat auditorium. A parking lot was transformed to a...Read more