• 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

  • A city highway alternative for Brooklyn

    When transportation engineers make problematic city highway proposals, CNU members sometimes offer alternative design solutions that broaden the conversation—and that's the case with the BQE in Brooklyn.
    It was not Jane Jacobs who first successfully fought the powerful Robert Moses on a highway proposal that would have torn a neighborhood apart. It was the citizens of Brooklyn Heights, across from Lower Manhattan. A citizen-led campaign scuttled Moses’s 1950s plan to build the Brooklyn-Queens...Read more

  • Recapturing retail market share for downtown

    One key aspect to Missoula's downtown master plan involves making the city center a retail destination once again.
    The revival of downtown living in Missoula, Montana, offers an opportunity to open new retail stores and reverse some of the lost market share that occurred since the middle of the last century, according to retail expert Robert Gibbs, a consultant on the city’s downtown master plan. Downtown once...Read more