• A mosaic of active streets and public space

    A former cinema site becomes a haven for a diverse suburban population in Virginia.
    Mosaic District is a 31-acre, two million square-foot mixed-use development in Fairfax County, Virginia, on a former a multiplex cinema site. The project comprises nine city blocks, with urban streets and public spaces, recently profiled in the book Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia . The area...Read more

  • Plight of the family-owned store

    Philip Langdon’s Common\Edge article , The Precarious State of the Mom-and-Pop Store , highlights the beauty of, and challenges facing, an American tradition. “Mom and pop” stores have been under economic pressure for many decades due to suburbanization and the proliferation of national chains. The...Read more

  • Four principles for a federal highways to boulevards program

    For many Americans, controlled-access highways are a regular part of their daily landscape. They take these high-speed roads for granted, with little consideration of how they were built, the damage they have caused, and the massive amount of money and subsidies that are needed to support them. But...Read more

  • Diverging diamond dystopia: Boston edition

    This article began as a would-be tweetstorm, until I realized there was too much to say. Jonathan Berk, director of Patronicity , tweeted out an image of this new intersection planned by MassDOT for Natick, a Boston suburb, and it was a shock. Sure, folks have built these monstrosities in Utah,...Read more