• A parking lot and a plaza

    The Memphis Medical District is a 2.6-square-mile area that has gained plenty of jobs, but has lost most of its population in the last 50 years. The area has loads of institutional buildings and surface parking lots, and many underutilized blocks. The city and the institutions are trying to...Read more

  • Turning a ‘stroad’ into a street

    “Stroad” is a term coined by Strong Towns’ Chuck Marohn to describe the poorly designed commercial streets found in conventional suburban environments across America. These thoroughfares are part street, part road, hence the name stroad, and perform neither function very well. Redesigning such...Read more

  • Calculating ‘induced demand’

    Recently the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) created a very simple tool that is long needed: A calculator of “induced demand” in transportation . This is the economic concept that applies when supply increases, price declines, and therefore demand for goods rises. Most notably and controversially,...Read more

  • Valletta cityscape

    This view of Valletta, Malta, by urbanist Dhiru Thadani, drawn from a peninsula that extends out to in the harbor, doesn’t seem to have changed much in centuries. A photo of the same view, easy to find on the Internet, reveals a few telecommunications towers, some motor vehicles, and splashes of...Read more