• Ten political benefits of walkable places

    This is fourth in a series of articles on the advantages of building human-scale cities and towns.
    There are many benefits to building walkable places and complete neighborhoods, backed up by research and common sense. A research report called Cities Alive by Arup, a multinational engineering and design firm, enumerated 50 advantages of walkable places. This article, the fourth in a series, is...Read more

  • 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