• Visionary leadership creates new downtown

    Frisco, Texas, has been one of the fastest growing cities in the US over the last three decades, going from a small town of 6,000 in 1990 to more than 200,000 today. In the 1990s, when the city north of Dallas began to boom, officials acquired land for civic buildings like a city hall and police...Read more

  • A man who loved and observed cities

    A biography of William Whyte reveals a big thinker with a keen eye for details and a trust of his own observations over dominant planning theories—a trait he shared with collaborator Jane Jacobs.
    William H. “Holly” Whyte is best known, in urban planning circles, for his sociological research into what makes public spaces successful, as reported in his 1980 book, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces . Whyte, who died in 1999 at 81, used cameras, careful observation, and collection of data...Read more

  • New urban plan focuses on healthy living, affordability

    The City of Las Cruces is planning an "aspirational" Transect-based neighborhood that includes modular housing on a publicly owned site.
    The City of Las Cruces, New Mexico, is planning a major new urban neighborhood on 150 acres of city owned land about three miles east of downtown. The East Lohman Development Plan calls for nearly 1,000 residential units, with an emphasis on affordable housing. The plan includes a new transit...Read more

  • What good are planners if zoning disappears?

    In Arbitrary Lines, M. Nolan Gray offers a vision for a post-zoning world—including a productive shift in the planning profession.
    M. Nolan Gray has good timing with Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix it , one of the top selling urban planning and development books of the year. Zoning is being challenged like never before in the century since it caught fire as a public policy. Zoning reform is...Read more