• 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

  • 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