• Panama City adopts recovery plan in wake of hurricane

    The Florida Panhandle city survived Category 5 Michael with most of the downtown intact—the plan looks to a more resilient future in the face of potential sea level rise.
    Panama City, Florida, approved a strategic plan for downtown recovery and resilience in early October, a year after Hurricane Michael tore through the city as a Category 5 hurricane. Thousands of buildings in the city of 37,000 people suffered roof and other damage. Panama City is a waterfront town...Read more

  • Learning from Manhattan’s urban imperfections

    New York is a great city that breaks many rules of urban planning. Here's what its imperfections can teach us about city building.
    “New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city,” Lewis Mumford, 1979.​ The above quote is featured on a wall in the Museum of the City of New York, which I visited on a recent trip to our most unequivocally urban city. Later, as I walked down 5 th Avenue, Mumford’s keen...Read more

  • Can an electric bicycle take the place of a car?

    Not if you can't use it for shopping—and that's why protected bike lanes are one key to reducing carbon emissions.
    These days I’m riding an electric bike. I didn’t intend to. I believed that a decarbonized future would be ushered in by electric cars. I bought one. I wanted one that I could throw a bicycle in the back. The car was expensive, even with the tax incentives. But boy was it quiet! And the...Read more

  • Retreats, eco-villages, and walkable communities

    A retreat is often used in real estate marketing to describe anything from a gated suburban resort subdivision to enclaves and eco-villages. Ideally, a new urbanist neo-traditional version includes the same fundamental principles of villages and neighborhoods in towns and cities—walkability,...Read more