• 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

  • Budgeting for a fractal city: Campus design, part 5

    Most funding should go to small projects in a living city. Instead, funding is often skewed toward large projects.
    Author’s note: This is the fifth in a series of ten essays that present innovative techniques for designing and repairing a corporate or university campus. These tools combine New Urbanist principles with Alexandrian design methods. The present-day project funding formula — skewed towards the...Read more

  • Vision for healing a megacity

    Bangalore has grown like a plate of seafood spaghetti—it's green spaces are reduced to a few sprigs. The city needs a new vision.
    Bangalore residents love their city. And Singapore residents have immense pride in their city. They are evangelical in inviting visitors to their city, to have the global population witness and endorse their success. Bangalore was known as the ‘garden city’ of India. Legend has it that in the 1960s...Read more