• Adding value to a commercial shopping center

    Wheatland Plaza in Duncanville is a model for adding value to an underutilized site along a suburban arterial through an efficient mixed-use design.
    As retail suffers and goes through technological change, this presents problems and opportunities for local communities—some of which can be solved through design transformations. Thousands of strip malls are struggling or vacant, especially in the suburbs. This image from Wheatland Plaza in...Read more

  • Kentucky wins in a walk

    Basketball fans across America have filled out their brackets using all kinds of analysis, but probably nobody else is using Walk Score to determine NCAA predictions. Here’s how the teams would fare.
    UPDATE: The Walk Score picks have not done so well after the first full weekend. Only six Sweet Sixteen Walk Score picks survived: Florida, Duke, Houston, Purdue, Kentucky, and Tennessee. St. John's, which we projected as a finalist, lost in a first-round upset. We only have a chance for two in the...Read more

  • For housing, the medium is the street

    We need street network reform, not just housing, to create abundant, thriving, healthy communities.
    There’s a new book generating discussion on housing and zoning—two topics that urbanists have been immersed in for decades. Abundance , by prominent progressive thinkers Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, emphasizes zoning reform to put America back on track and provide direction for the Democratic...Read more

  • New towns are important part of New Urbanism

    New towns have always been part of New Urbanism, and the movement should embrace that aspect as a necessary complement to infill, retrofit, and highway transformation.
    After two decades of city-focused urbanism, new towns are generating new interest. To answer the demand for new and affordable housing in developed countries in general and the US in particular, the thinking is that we need more than infill. New Urbanism has long been associated in the popular...Read more