• Supporting a federal role in highway removal

    Highways to Boulevards campaign organizers and CNU members visited 20 Congressional offices in late October, to discuss two current proposals in Congress that would offer funds for highway removal.
    In July, both houses of Congress took a momentous step toward recognizing and repairing the damage federal highways have inflicted upon urban communities. Congress has proposed not one, but two different federal highways-to-boulevards pilot programs , both of which include a novel provision to open...Read more

  • Seeking Paradise—a year later, town plans to rebuild

    An unprecedented public process created a long-term recovery plan for the California municipality leveled by fire—and sets a model for responding to a changing world.
    A year ago November 8, the Camp Fire swept through Paradise, California—and there may be no community that was destroyed as thoroughly in any modern US natural disaster. The working-class town of 26,800 people (2018 estimate) lost 85 percent of its buildings in a fire that claimed 86 lives...Read more

  • 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