• The great suburban Ponzi infrastructure experiment

    Charles Marohn's new book presents a way out for American cities that are trapped in a vicious cycle: Build neighborhoods one small step at a time rather than going straight to utopia.
    Planner and engineer Charles Marohn has a knack for coining words and phrases that encapsulate big problems in the built environment. One is “stroad,” a thoroughfare that combines the characteristics of roads and streets and serves neither purpose well. Others include “the great suburban experiment...Read more

  • The long road home for The Bahamas

    If The Bahamas rebuilds using the wisdom hard-earned on these islands over time, then the disaster of Dorian can result in a renewal of the places and buildings that have made The Bahamas world-famous, and have long driven the economy.
    It is heartbreaking to see the suffering and devastation in The Bahamas from Hurricane Dorian, which struck these islands in early September, and thoughts of those lonely rebuilding years ahead are even harder to bear for all of us who love The Bahamas. It’ll be lonely because after the first...Read more

  • Jargon-free urbanism

    Clear, jargon-free messages that promote urbanism are to be commended—whether they come from CNU or an aligned organization. Today I highlight a video from The Incremental Development Alliance (IncDev), in which they explain their organization's mission: “To help regular people build small, hard-...Read more

  • Road diet creates people-oriented corridor for suburb

    The city of Oak Park has the density—it needs placemaking, and that is why an automobile-oriented corridor is being transformed with a linear greenway and complete street.
    A quintessential first-ring suburb, Oak Park, Michigan, was the nation’s fastest-growing city in the 1950s. The city bordering on Detroit has nearly 30,000 residents—at 5,700 people per square mile it is substantially denser than Portland, Oregon. Yet Oak Park has no walkable downtown or even a...Read more