• Shift to the suburbs not your grandfather’s sprawl

    Core cities are losing population to the suburbs, but the 2020s will not repeat the last half of the 20th Century. The suburbs are bound to urbanize.
    News reports over the past year have indicated that sprawl is returning with a vengeance in the 2020s. The latest article to make the claim is “ How the pandemic supercharged sprawl ,” in Bloomberg News . There is little doubt of movement out of core cities since early 2020. The extent is of the...Read more

  • Signature park project bridges community divide

    The deliberative engagement process used by the 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C. shows how community revitalization can benefit existing residents.
    Successful equitable development takes work but there are steps and actions organizations can take to ensure local communities are truly involved. The 11th Street Bridge Park in Washington, D.C. will break ground later this year, but it is the long-term community engagement work that illustrates...Read more

  • Making lemonade out of lemons: A case for zoning reform

    CNU’s Project for Code Reform is filling a need for incremental code reform and furthering statewide programs to remove barriers to inclusive communities.
    Have you ever looked closely at a city or town and wondered why it looks the way it does? Why do different neighborhoods within a city or town have distinct character? Why do buildings not exceed a certain height? If you’re a New Urbanist, chances are you’ve asked yourself these types of questions...Read more

  • The chameleon of urban architecture

    “Ambiguous and composite buildings” solve multiple urban design problems through a flexible approach to building form and architectural language.
    In the Excursus appended to the end of the influential 1978 book Collage City , Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter include what they call “an abridged list of stimulants … as possible Object Trouves in the urbanistic collage.” One of these found objects is the idea of a building type they called Ambiguous...Read more