• Small city invests in downtown

    With a new urban vision and context-based street design, Olean has taken a bold step to revive its economy and social life.
    Olean, a small city in isolated southwestern New York State, has transformed its wide main street, North Union Street, using five roundabouts and a new tree-lined center median to calm traffic and shorten pedestrian crossing distances. Four lanes of traffic were reduced to two and several traffic...Read more

  • Pattern retrofit for resilience planning

    This is part 3 of a series on retrofitting urban patterns to create more resilient places where decentralized capital can flourish. A key step in that direction would be a specific kind of community planning exercise.
    Note: See Part 1 and Part 2 of this series.​ Have you noticed how most city plans sit on the shelf? After several years working in planning, I have become disillusioned with all the useless plans—land use plans, comprehensive plans, sustainability plans—all of them doing very little to address...Read more

  • The ‘Continuous City’ versus the ‘Ruptured City’

    Review of Daniel Solomon's book, Housing and the City: Love versus Hope, Schiffer Publishing, 192 pp., $45 hardcover.
    Soon after finishing Daniel Solomon’s Housing and the City: Love versus Hope , I took the train to New York and saw “Toward a Concrete Utopia”—a show at the Museum of Modern Art that celebrates the post-World War II architecture of Yugoslavia. The contrast between Solomon’s clear-eyed book and MoMA...Read more

  • Pattern retrofit for resilience options

    This is part 2 of a series on retrofitting urban patterns to create more resilient places where decentralized capital can flourish.
    It is understandable if leaders of places like Cobb County, Georgia, a poster child for American sprawl, are not interested in addressing their deep urban pattern problems. Fixing underlying block, street, and lot patterns is not a sexy topic like architecture, placemaking, or major economic...Read more