• ‘Urbanizing the suburbs’ goes big

    Suburban Remix, a new book, reports on commercial development of mixed-use, walkable centers as a powerful force in the American landscape.
    “Without damaging a blade of grass on a single lawn” suburbs across North America can transform outmoded shopping centers and office parks “into a new generation of compact, dense, walkable, mixed-use, urban places that accommodate multiple dreams,” writes architect and urban designer David Dixon...Read more

  • Five takeaways from the 2018 World Urban Forum

    Implementing the New Urban Agenda will be hard work—public spaces, including streets, provide the tissue connecting people to the benefits of cities.
    It's been over a year now since all 193 countries of the United Nations adopted by acclamation the "New Urban Agenda," the outcome document of the Habitat III conference held in October 2016. The historic nature of that achievement is hard to over-state: for the first time, we have a world-wide...Read more

  • Towering madness in Portland

    A rebuttal to my friend Rob Steuteville’s recent post.
    Rob Steuteville and I agree on many things, and in a recent post of his, I agreed with most of it – up to the last paragraph. “Although the new towers—linked by a 670-foot-high bridge with a botanical garden—would remake the Portland’s skyline, the towers have similar width and depth to other Pearl...Read more

  • Small apartments in single-family neighborhoods

    A Midwest city considers an affordable option to house more families in walkable neighborhoods.
    To relieve a worsening shortage of housing, Minneapolis planners have suggested allowing the construction of four-unit apartment buildings in nearly all neighborhoods, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports . The proposal to ease zoning restrictions on single-family neighborhoods would help fulfill...Read more