• Model cottages for hurricane recovery

    A tiny village of affordable cottages has just been built in Asheville, and the timing is fortuitous. That region desperately needs emergency housing that could also last and contribute to long-term sustainability.
    As the Asheville region recovers from the terrible effects of Hurricane Helene, the coming year will see a huge need for emergency and long-term housing. As it happens, a nonprofit called Beloved Asheville is just now completing a tiny village that could be a model for building housing affordably...Read more

  • Responding to disaster with placemaking hubs

    New urbanists are working in devastated areas in North Carolina, helping to set up the kernels of community rebuilding.
    After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, new urbanists ran a charrette in an enormous ballroom, drawing elaborate plans to rebuild 11 cities and town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. That historic effort had long-term benefits, but was arguably far removed from day-to-day realities of the victims at the time...Read more

  • From expressway to parkway

    The plan for the Scajaquada Expressway would help bridge the divide in the central part of Buffalo, New York, bringing back the glories of an Olmsted-designed greenway.
    At the same time that New York State is looking at burying a freeway in Buffalo, the state DOT is also studying a plan to replace the 3.5-mile-long Scajaquada Expressway with a parkway and boulevard. Since the 1950s, the Scajaquada Expressway in Buffalo has divided a Frederick Law Olmsted-designed...Read more

  • Putting historic stables to new use

    The Chapman Stables housing in DC shows how sites can evolve radically, while the street-facing facade remains.
    Urban buildings and blocks transform radically over time. The Chapman Stables site on N Street NW in DC was a coal yard, stables, a garage and repair shop for Model Ts in the 1920s, a corrugated box factory, and a warehouse. The Truxton Circle neighborhood was a rough-and-tumble part of the City in...Read more