• A 25-year laboratory of suburban transformation

    Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, is a model for more sustainable suburbs and regions.
    I first visited Orenco Station in 2000, when it was one of the most talked-about transit-oriented developments (TODs). Back then, few prominent TOD examples existed anywhere in the US. Now they are much more common. My impression of Orenco was that of decent New Urbanism, but not good TOD. Arriving...Read more

  • Office park redo is a model for mixed-use

    Downtown Doral targets families, creates downtown in amorphous suburb, and avoids the blank slate.
    Downtown Doral in Dade County, Florida, shows how a 1970s business park can be become a mixed-use downtown while retaining some of the old buildings and infrastructure. The project avoids a “blank slate” approach to transforming a single-use, automobile-oriented place, that would appear to be a...Read more

  • New Urbanism in America’s heartland

    Uptown Normal is helping to bring a small downtown back to life, providing an economic boost to a town in Central Illinois.
    When I was tracking neighborhood-scale new urbanist projects in the early 2000s, Uptown Normal in the Town of Normal, Illinois, was just breaking ground. Planned by Farr Associates of Chicago, Uptown Normal was a different kind of traditional neighborhood development than I was used to seeing at...Read more

  • Transect-based plan and code for rural community

    Groveland, a rapidly developing small city 30 miles west of Orlando, Florida, adopted a plan and code that included the beautiful Transect diagram shown above. The mostly still-rural community, which nearly doubled in population last decade, adopted the new regulations during the pandemic after a...Read more