• Shared street connects culture and community

    The three-block Chicago street design creates a plaza-like feel by raising the street and eliminating raised curbs.
    Chicago is showing how change in public infrastructure can transform a neighborhood with drug and gang problems. Located in the ethnically Asian Uptown neighborhood, Argyle Shared Street is a shared-use, pedestrian-prioritizing streetscape. “This project creates an area that is more walkable, more...Read more

  • Walkable urban in three cities

    Here’s a graphic from a terrific article in a terrific issue of D Magazine , the regional publication for Dallas-Fort Worth. The authors of the article, Christopher Leinberger and Tracy Loh of George Washington University, are among the few researchers who are studying walkable development over...Read more

  • The copious capacity of street grids

    Historic street grids can handle greater traffic of all kinds—so why aren’t we building more of them?
    As far as I have been able to determine, no one has ever scientifically compared the capacity of historic street grids with modern road systems. If they did, this comparison is well hidden—which is amazing because the US has invested trillions of dollars on automobile-oriented street networks on...Read more

  • A campus opens up to the city

    A recent UConn relocation from a leafy suburban campus to downtown Hartford, Connecticut, follows wider urban trends.
    Four decades after moving its campus to suburban West Hartford, the University of Connecticut moved back to downtown Hartford—bringing mixed-use development and the revitalization of the Hartford Times Building, a neoclassical landmark. Because the suburban campus had been difficult for city-based...Read more