• Pattern retrofit for resilience planning

    This is part 3 of a series on retrofitting urban patterns to create more resilient places where decentralized capital can flourish. A key step in that direction would be a specific kind of community planning exercise.
    Note: See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.​ Have you noticed how most city plans sit on the shelf? After several years working in planning, I have become disillusioned with all the useless plans—land use plans, comprehensive plans, sustainability plans—all of them doing very little to address...Read more

  • The ‘Continuous City’ versus the ‘Ruptured City’

    Review of Daniel Solomon's book, Housing and the City: Love versus Hope, Schiffer Publishing, 192 pp., $45 hardcover.
    Soon after finishing Daniel Solomon’s Housing and the City: Love versus Hope , I took the train to New York and saw “Toward a Concrete Utopia”—a show at the Museum of Modern Art that celebrates the post-World War II architecture of Yugoslavia. The contrast between Solomon’s clear-eyed book and MoMA...Read more

  • Pattern retrofit for resilience options

    This is part 2 of a series on retrofitting urban patterns to create more resilient places where decentralized capital can flourish.
    It is understandable if leaders of places like Cobb County, Georgia, a poster child for American sprawl, are not interested in addressing their deep urban pattern problems. Fixing underlying block, street, and lot patterns is not a sexy topic like architecture, placemaking, or major economic...Read more

  • What does inclusion mean for CNU?

    I invite you to think about the role of new urbanists—and how we can design our role—to reduce the burden of society's bias.
    Twenty-five years after the founding of the Congress for the New Urbanism, the board voted this past September to advance our commitment toward creating a more inclusive movement and through it, more inclusive communities. In doing so, we affirmed the words espoused in the Charter of the New...Read more