• The most housing-forward planning framework in Canada

    Growing Together in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, employs robust public engagement to accommodate a half-century of growth around transit stations. The City of Kitchener won a 2025 CNU Charter Award in The Region: Metropolis, City and Town category.
    Growing Together is a planning framework that introduces entirely new land uses and zones customized to Major Transit Station Areas (MTSAs) in Kitchener, a city of 256,000 in Southern Ontario, Canada. The Ion light rail system began operating in 2019, with 11 stations in the 53-square-mile...Read more

  • Modeling Missing Middle across an unaffordable region

    Cape Cod Resiliency: Missing Middle changed the perception and implementation of housing on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Union Studio Architecture & Community Design won a 2025 CNU Charter Award in The Region: Metropolis, City and Town category.
    Cape Cod, with its iconic New England character and over 500 miles of coastline, faces a housing crisis that threatens year-round residents who provide the workforce to keep the economy going. Since 2000, many year-round houses have been converted to second homes for vacationers. Cape Cod workers,...Read more

  • Mapping the culture and retrofit of a car-oriented community

    A Framework Plan for Cherokee Village envisions retrofitting a partially built 20th-century new town. University of Arkansas Community Design Center won a Merit Award in The Region: Metropolis, City and Town category of the 2025 CNU Charter Awards.
    Cherokee Village is a mid-20th-Century planned new town that failed to reach its full potential. After 70 years, only 20 percent of the lots are built, housing a population of about 5,000 people. It was planned for 60,000 people, served by nearly 300 miles of roads over 21 square miles of northern...Read more
  • A photo of the skyline of Hartford, Connecticut during the daytime.

    Envisioning Hartford: infrastructure, equity, and renewal at a critical crossroads

    Envision Hartford rejects the notion that smaller cities must accept decline and can deliver a bold, pro-urban legacy worthy of the region’s time and treasure.
    As federal, state, and city officials move forward with plans to reconstruct Interstates 84 and 91 through Hartford, Connecticut, a rare opportunity emerges to repair the city’s fractured urban fabric and revitalize its economic base. For decades, motorists have sped through Hartford, unaware of...Read more