• New Urbanism's future in Utah

    The rules and parameters for growth need to change, but developers also have a responsibility—to not hide behind a rear view image of the market.
    I have been a member of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) for over 15 years. In fact, one could argue I have been affiliated with CNU for my entire professional career. CNU has certainly shaped my thinking for longer than my awareness of CNU as an organization. I have allowed that influence...Read more

  • A unified small developer vision for urban revival

    A coalition in Flint, Michigan, works with many hands toward rebuilding a neighborhood from the ground up.
    As Flint, Michigan, declined from an industrial city of nearly 200,000 people to less than 100,000 people in 60 years, abandoned homes and blight became a big problem. Also, trust in the public sector and institutions declined, a situation that worsened in light of Flint’s notorious recent lead-in-...Read more

  • The emperor's new buildings

    A book review of Making Dystopia: The Strange Rise and Survival of Architectural Barbarism by James Stevens Curl.
    For most reform-minded urbanists today, the complicity of architectural Modernism in the urban fiascoes of the last century is not in dispute. A representative (and seminal) criticism was Jane Jacobs' withering 1961 attack, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she described Le...Read more

  • New urban ghost town calls forth a different mindset

    On this gloomy February day, I think back to 2008, the start of the Great Recession, which seems like a lifetime ago. There were many large-scale projects, planned well in advance of the crash, that died. Some of these projects were new urban projects. Few left as stark a reminder as Bloomfield...Read more