• Not hard to design a great public space

    Arcata Plaza, laid out along with the town’s first streets in 1850, was first used to load lumber from the sawmill—and has served as the commercial heart of the Northern California town ever since. Arcata Plaza is a square, literally, and the design is not complicated. A square should not be too...Read more

  • Fighting to save a troubled city

    A documentary on Youngstown, Ohio, won top prize at the Better Cities Film Festival in Detroit.
    A feature film on Youngstown, Ohio, a city that exemplifies industrial decline, won the Grand Prize Best Feature Film award in 2021 from the Better Cities Film Festival . The Place That Makes Us , honored in Detroit this week, tells the story of people who stayed in Youngstown and worked to rebuild...Read more

  • Climate adaptation, mitigation, and urban design

    Analyzing how community design can impact various phases of climate change response, both local and global.
    Urban planning and design are among the most effective tools in dealing with climate change, because they address both mitigation and adaptation. Mitigation is global in scale—it involves the reduction of carbon emissions that are linked to rising global temperatures. Communities can lower...Read more

  • Charter Awards 2022: Bringing people together

    New Urbanism has always been about the architecture of community—that phrase was in the subtitle of Peter Katz’s seminal 1994 book that helped launch this movement. The architecture of community has a double meaning—first, it refers to a scale of design that is larger than one building, a...Read more