• Downtown expansion for Texas suburb guided by vision

    Frisco Square has doubled the size of a historic downtown as the city prepares for regional transit.
    Years ago, I kept a list of new urbanist projects on a neighborhood scale that I updated annually or semi-annually. The last update was December of 2003, when I counted 648 projects, with 369 of them under construction. I stopped maintaining that list because it was growing too big—but more...Read more

  • Micro-townhouses designed for flexibility

    Twelve-foot-wide townhouses in Utah? They combine transit-oriented density with homeownership, and buyers can cut costs in multiple ways.
    Daybreak in South Jordan, Utah, a top-selling community nationally, shows how transit-oriented design can be achieved with production builders—and it is a laboratory of housing ideas . The latest is the “micro-townhouse.” The 12-foot-wide units range from 1,125-1,450 square feet on lots less than 1...Read more

  • Tactical Urbanism comes of age

    One clear lesson from the pandemic: Experimentation with streets may yield tremendous benefits with less downside than previously thought.
    Tactical Urbanism has been building momentum over the last decade since the concept was defined by Mike Lydon and Tony Garcia of Street Plans Collaborative. Many new urban firms have adopted Tactical Urbanism tools in recent years, leading to the creation of temporary public spaces, quickly built...Read more

  • Rick Cole’s new role: Updating urbanism for the 21st Century

    Note: This interview was recently published in The Planning Report : Insider’s Guide to Planning and Infrastructure. Questions posed by TPR are in bold. After more than three decades of leadership in government and public policy in Southern California, you’re stepping into a national role heading...Read more