• 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

  • New Urbanism’s quiet achievement

    New Urbanism planning principles have been incorporated into comprehensive plans all across Texas, and this has begun to have real impacts on people and places.
    I get a lot of emails from an academic website. I’m not an academic, but occasionally they alert me to interesting papers. A five-year-old thesis paper , by a masters public administration student at Texas State University, is worth exploring today for what the paper says about New Urbanism—and for...Read more

  • Changes in retail encourage walkable urban designs

    For many years, retailers resisted the architecture of street-facing storefronts, but necessity is the mother of flexibility.
    This is one of a series of ongoing Public Square articles on the market, technological, and cultural transformation of the $5 trillion retail industry—and how it relates to a continued shift toward walkable, urban living. When America switched from urban downtowns and main streets to suburban...Read more