• A unified small developer vision for urban revival

    A coalition in Flint, Michigan, works with many hands toward rebuilding a neighborhood from the ground up.
    As Flint, Michigan, declined from an industrial city of nearly 200,000 people to less than 100,000 people in 60 years, abandoned homes and blight became a big problem. Also, trust in the public sector and institutions declined, a situation that worsened in light of Flint’s notorious recent lead-in-...Read more

  • 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