• How roundabouts helped to build a downtown

    Carmel, Indiana, has been called the “roundabout city.” It has also built a major downtown from scratch in the last quarter-century. These two facts are related.
    Carmel, Indiana, a city of just over a hundred thousand people, has eliminated nearly all of its traffic lights—a remarkable achievement—and replaced them with 158 roundabouts that calm traffic and keep it flowing on a network of suburban arterial roads. Carmel is a “ boomburb ,” defined as a city...Read more

  • Playa Vista: High density, happy residents

    A quarter century after the iconic Los Angeles development was launched, a community survey shows high levels of resident satisfaction.
    Playa Vista in Los Angeles was one of the most ambitious and artistically stunning early New Urbanist plans, designed in a 1989 charrette by two of the movement's founding firms. A major developer, Maguire Thomas Partners, called DPZ CoDesign, led by a young Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk...Read more

  • Study calls for land use changes to improve road safety

    Land use has a profound and largely unacknowledged role in the death and injury of pedestrians and bicyclists, according to researchers. There are two answers—but one is far superior.
    New research from Florida Atlantic and Columbia universities examines why the US has failed to make streets safer for “vulnerable users”—people outside of cars, especially pedestrians and bicyclists. That failure is evident despite the proliferation of Complete Streets and Vision Zero policies over...Read more

  • Charleston designs the future of affordable housing

    Project 3500 pre-designs and pre-permits thousands of affordable housing units on city-owned land.
    Charleston, South Carolina, recently unveiled a potentially groundbreaking strategy to build thousands of pre-designed, permitted affordable housing units on city-owned land. The city is working with Savannah-based Sottile & Sottile on urban design and British architects Ben Pentreath and Hugh...Read more