• The Square’s top 10 for 2019

    Good urbanism allows us to look forward and back simultaneously, and the top Public Square articles do that. The most-read pieces cover many aspects of life: architecture, religion, transportation, philosophy, housing, nature, shopping, and even golf (!).
    I use a baseball analogy to describe the response to Public Square articles. One that gets a good number of readers is a base hit. Double that, and it's a home run. Double that, and it's a “grand slam”—like all of the top 10 articles for 2019. These articles cover such a broad range of topics that...Read more

  • ‘Car-free’ development breaks ground in Arizona

    Large mixed-use apartment complex in the midst of suburbia will be laid out like a European village with architecture appropriate to the southwestern desert.
    It’s not very often that a planned new urban community gets national coverage in the Wall Street Journal , Forbes , and Fast Company , among other publications. Yet that’s the case with the 16-acre Culdesac Tempe (something of a misnomer because the project has no cul-de-sacs—not in the common...Read more

  • For Brooklyn: Streets instead of a highway

    As the City of New York is talking about spending $4-8 billion on rebuilding the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (BQE), a pair of new urbanists are proposing that a section of this Interstate be torn down and replaced by city streets. In a guest column for the New York Daily News , architect and urban...Read more

  • Cities are like brains—immense networks of connective tissue

    Intriguing lessons for urbanists are coming, surprisingly, from neuroscience. Understanding the underlying structure of cities can help us to formulate better urban policies and practices.
    Urbanists have long been drawing lessons from other disciplines, including sociology, environmental psychology and ecology. Now there are intriguing new lessons being offered by a perhaps surprising field: brain science. But to explore the story of those lessons, we'll have to start first with...Read more