• Neighborhoods are key to sustainable future

    A review of Douglas Farr’s Sustainable Nation: Urban Design Patterns for the Future
    Safeguarding the environment—largely by designing and operating buildings and communities more wisely than we’ve done for the past 200 years—is the most crucial endeavor the Earth’s inhabitants are now engaged in. If we fail, not only will the weather turn more deadly. Many species will die out,...Read more

  • Using software to measure the UrbanFootprint

    A new urban tool is designed help cities, planners, and developers with scenario planning.
    Peter Calthorpe and his partner Joe DiStefano have a venture-capital funded startup designed to provide municipalities, non-governmental organizations, developers, and design and planning firms with a powerful cloud-based software tool for planning walkable, transit-served communities. Fast Company...Read more

  • Five takeaways from the 2018 World Urban Forum

    Implementing the New Urban Agenda will be hard work—public spaces, including streets, provide the tissue connecting people to the benefits of cities.
    It's been over a year now since all 193 countries of the United Nations adopted by acclamation the "New Urban Agenda," the outcome document of the Habitat III conference held in October 2016. The historic nature of that achievement is hard to over-state: for the first time, we have a world-wide...Read more

  • They paved paradise, put up a parking lot

    The asphalt-industrial complex—otherwise known as Big Asphalt—took control of our cities and towns. Here's how we can take it back.
    In America we have 2.5 million miles of paved roads, and an estimated 800 million parking spaces . Dwight Eisenhower famously warned America about the "military-industrial complex." I think he should have warned the country about the "asphalt-industrial complex," which has done more damage to where...Read more