• Designing gathering spaces in a car-oriented city

    A new urbanist development named after a literary hometown focuses on the arts and much-needed public space.
    Newport News, Virginia, is a city of 186,000 people where downtown is hard to find. The area that Google identifies as the heart of Newport News is an office/industrial park. The traditional center at the city's south end, on the James River waterfront, primarily consists of parking lots and single...Read more

  • Habersham marks 25 years of community building

    South Carolina development offers convincing lessons for how builders, developers, and architects can create a successful new town.
    Habersham, South Carolina, broke ground in 1998, after Robert Turner developed Newpoint in Beaufort and an affordable infill project in Port Royal—all located in the state’s Lowcountry. Habersham is a quarter century old and one of the best-known and most influential traditional neighborhood...Read more

  • Children, left behind by suburbia, need better community design

    Walkable, mixed-use planning is the key to getting young people outside again and enabling their independence.
    “Why don’t children leave the house?” Childhood in America is losing its charm. The lack of effective transit, coupled with the lack of kid-friendly destinations and the feeling of more dangerous neighborhoods, means that today’s youth find it harder than ever to go outside, meet up with friends,...Read more

  • 21st Century infill urbanism that looks historic

    Urban designers and architects are astounded by a charming, small, mid-block development in Charleston that is 2-4 stories tall yet is comparable to the gross density of Manhattan.
    Catfiddle Street in Charleston, South Carolina, is a remarkable development that most people would not believe has been recently built. It got a lot of attention on Twitter.com over the last few days because urbanists gathered in the city for several overlapping events. As architect Erik Bootsma...Read more