• Suburban retrofit is ‘autophagy’ of the built environment

    Conventional suburbs are cities that have grown obese. We need processes for reusing their worn-out parts and creating something of higher value.
    My summer reading sometimes leads to connecting diverse topics with my area of professional focus—the built environment. I recently read a book on fasting 1 that introduced me to the body’s recycling process called “autophagy,” and I thought about suburban retrofit. I don’t know that anyone else...Read more

  • Washington Drawings: Abe to Zoo

    Dhiru A. Thadani has produced an illustrative book that is full of insights into the people, places, history, and urbanism of our nation’s capital.
    Dhiru A. Thadani has a unique knowledge of Washington, DC. Prior to the Internet and Google maps, Thadani led a group of volunteers on a 13-year effort, starting in the 1970s, to exactly draw the footprint of buildings and public spaces of the nation’s capital. This plan, based on the famous 1748...Read more

  • Restoring a lost square

    Often, in the 20th Century, the courthouse square structure was damaged by automobile-oriented planning. Recovering what was lost is not easy—it’s a process of strategic elimination and addition to repair the form that is hidden while the town grows.
    What can be done when a historic courthouse town has been robbed of its square? Clarkesville, Georgia, was founded two centuries ago as the seat of Habersham County, and grew as an early resort town in the Appalachian foothills about 70 miles northeast of Atlanta. The municipality of about 2,000...Read more

  • How zoning reform has helped to turn Buffalo around

    The New York Times recently reported on Buffalo’s “ other story ,” an unexpected and dramatic increase in population in the last decade, the first time this had happened in 70 years. The “other story” in the Times headline is a reference to the Buffalo shooting, which brought weeks of negative...Read more