• Florida’s success with context-based street classification

    If context-based street design works in the most automobile-dominated state, it can make a difference anywhere.
    Attempts to create walkable places become an order of magnitude more difficult when state-owned thoroughfares are involved. The laudable goal of creating a human-scale neighborhood may descend into a multiyear battle—sometimes won by planners, more often by the engineers—and the outcome is nearly...Read more

  • New college town for South Bend

    The outcome of two decades of planning and implementation, Eddy Street is one of the more impressive new urban neighborhoods built adjacent to a university.
    South Bend’s Eddy Street neighborhood, located just south of the University of Notre Dame, was completed in 2020 after a 20-year process of planning and implementation. The result is one of the most impressive new “college towns” in the US. The 48-acre neighborhood includes a main street that has...Read more

  • Food trucks and people friendly cities

    What can the humble food truck teach us about Urbanism?
    Walking home after an afternoon class one day at my alma mater, UW - Madison, I decided to walk through Library Mall. Library Mall is a pedestrian-only plaza surrounded by public buildings: two libraries (shocker I know), the UW bookstore, a church, and several other university buildings. From...Read more

  • Theorizing the rural-urban transect

    The history, influences, and philosophy of transect zones.
    "What matters in a building or town is not its outward shape, its physical geometry alone, but the events that happen there" —Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building 1979 Two Ethics of Research Urban planning paradigms are influenced by two prevailing ethics: utilitarianism and...Read more