• USC Village has street life galore

    A ton of people and a well-designed public realm combine in the alchemy of a happy place in LA.
    I was recently in southern California, for an in-person meeting of CNU staff (the first since the pandemic began), with our new executive director, Rick Cole, a long-time resident, former mayor, and city manager of Pasadena. I took Metro rail most of the way from Pasadena to LAX, but got off on an...Read more

  • Every traffic projection is wrong

    Instead of accepting that dynamic relations of traffic are unknowable and developing a management approach that does not rely on false projections to provide an illusion of certainty, traffic modelers make their models more complicated and opaque.
    Editor's note: The following is an excerpt from Chapter Six of Confessions of a Recovering Engineer: Transportation for a Strong Town , the latest book in the Strong Towns series. It has been slightly modified for this space. The goal of traffic modeling is not to be right; it is to create a...Read more

  • A gridded city of 5 million people proposed for Southwest

    Tech billionaire Marc Lore hired starchitect Bjarke Ingels for a new urban design of a city that would be based upon community ownership of land.
    The architecture world is buzzing with the proposal this week for a major new metropolis with the hallmarks of new urbanist planning in the Southwestern US desert. Opinions may differ on whether this is just a utopian idea or will, in fact, be built in part or in whole. Nevertheless the plan is...Read more

  • Improving urban design in a post-pandemic world

    CNU staff, new Executive Director Rick Cole, meet in person for the first time to find new ways to support complete, sustainable neighborhoods through the architecture of community.
    On June 1, 2021, we welcomed new Executive Director Rick Cole to the CNU family. He brought with him an impressive career, a trove of insights, and a passion for New Urbanism that was clear from day one. The only thing? As a remote organization, staff never met Rick in person and even between staff...Read more