• Lessons from travel: Het Schip

    Amsterdam architect Michel de Klerk and the patronage of Dutch merchants in the early 20th Century are an inspiration to today's wealthy classes on how to provide beautiful housing that is affordable to today's working class.
    I love to travel. Every trip widens my bandwidth, challenges my orthodoxy, introduces ingenious solutions to seemingly unsurmountable problems, and exposes me to the choices people make in living their lives as individuals and as a community. My recent trip to the Netherlands provided several such...Read more

  • A chance to repeat history

    Portland, Oregon, could open up the east bank of the Willamette River to adjacent neighborhoods and duplicate the success of the removal of Harbor Drive.
    Portland is a tale of two waterfronts. On the west bank of the Willamette River, Waterfront Park offers Portland’s residents direct access to the river in place of the former route of Harbor Drive, a freeway removed by the city in 1974. On the river’s east bank, I-5 deprives the growing Central...Read more

  • Restoring a parkway system in Buffalo

    The Kensington and Scajaquada expressways disrupted Frederick Law Olmsted's vision and divided neighborhoods, but that damage could be undone.
    Before the age of highways, celebrated landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted designed Delaware and Humboldt Parks, linked by the tree-lined boulevard of the Humboldt Parkway, in Buffalo, New York. The construction of the Kensington and Scajaquada Expressways in the 1960s marred this masterful...Read more

  • Never too late to stop the bulldozer

    Thirty-seven US urban highways were halted mid-construction by the communities in their path, saving city parks and neighborhoods from demolition.
    How late is too late for communities in the path of urban freeway construction to save their neighborhoods from the road’s negative impacts? Many may be familiar with the story of Jane Jacobs and other Greenwich Village community activists. In 1960s they opposed the construction of the Lower...Read more