• A 15-minute city for southeast London

    Thamesmead Expansion is a series of proposals for a large, transit-oriented site in London. Students at UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design won a Student Merit Award in the Neighborhood, District, and Corridor category of the 2023 Charter Awards.
    Like the US, Britain is experiencing a widespread housing affordability shortage, especially around London in the southeast of the UK. Opportunity areas for new housing in that region are critical—including a flat, 300-acre former military site on the Thames estuary where 12,000 to 15,000 living...Read more

  • Car-free, mobility-rich urbanism becoming a reality

    Designers of Culdesac developments in Tempe and Atlanta report progress in creating a built environment for shared mobility, as the first residents move in to the Arizona project.
    The first mobility-rich, car-free (at least in residential areas) Culdesac community is now becoming occupied, and the public spaces and buildings are living up to the attention-grabbing designs and renderings, architect and urban designer Daniel Parolek of Opticos Design told CNU. The first...Read more

  • How urbanism, density, and spatial enclosure are related

    Dhiru Thadani and Matt Bell, along with the CNU-DC Chapter board, orchestrated the recent Council on “ Density Without Urbanism/Urbanism Without Density. ” They see the event as the beginning of a series of CNU discussions on density and urbanism. “We wanted to understand what others were thinking...Read more

  • When is density good, and when is it harmful to cities?

    Providing density that supports a high quality of life requires a love for cities, putting ‘urbanism’ front and center, according to noted urban designers.
    Seventy-one New Urbanists, including many of the movement’s leading lights, gathered in Washington recently to address a set of increasingly urgent questions: If density is good for a city, how much of it should there be? How tall should the buildings rise? What forms should they take? Everyone...Read more