• Urbanism: 20/20 vision for 2020

    The control tower for the old Stapleton Airport in Denver is a machine for enhanced vision. The tower now has a view of one of the largest new urban developments in the world. Stapleton, Denver, contains nine neighborhoods, nine schools, 50 parks, and mixed-use shopping and business districts,...Read more

  • A tale of two neighborhoods

    Only two miles apart, the Baltimore neighborhoods of Park Heights and Guilford have radically different health outcomes. These two neighborhoods are divided by an Interstate highway (I-83), and were designated differently by financial (“redlining”) policies in the 1930s. The map and data come from...Read more

  • 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