• Climate goals translate to work for new urbanists

    A recent report by Brookings sums up the challenge for US climate goals: It can’t be done without moving much more decisively to compact, mixed-use, walkable development. To quote from their report: “Simply put, the United States cannot reach its GHG reduction targets if our urban areas continue to...Read more

  • Blocks versus barracks: On the missing chapter

    A discussion around the book, Architecture & the City, prompts a critique of prominent eco-urbanism developments on the basis that they fail to create good urbanism.
    Toward the end of John Ellis’s review of my recent book, Architecture & the City: Selected Essays , he suggested: A potential missing chapter in this otherwise splendid book could include examples of sustainable urbanism from other parts of the world. Taking clues from work such as Harrison...Read more

  • We need both EVs and the 15-minute city

    Without improvements in the way we plan and build communities, electric vehicles will never deliver on their sustainability promise.
    Farhad Manjoo's opinion piece for today’s New York Times notes the limits of electric vehicles (EVs). Despite a big market move to EVs and hybrids, the American fleet has barely improved its efficiency in the last 10 years—mostly because people are buying bigger cars. The move to bigger cars is...Read more

  • Community types and growth in the post-Covid era

    The scale and form of communities—and avoiding sprawl—will play critical roles in their long-term resilience.
    Cities and towns across the US and abroad are in financial crisis due to the pandemic, and some of the income generators on which they depended in recent decades may be permanently broken, but there are certain fundamentals of community survival and growth which are likely to continue long past...Read more