• How one building can make a difference

    There's been much discussion of creating what the late Ray Oldenburg called “third places,” why they are vanishing , and how they are linchpins of neighborhoods and social interaction. Neighborhood Lab, based in Copenhagen, created a graphic describing how a single building “can spark positive...Read more

  • How to reverse the ‘urban doom loop’

    Walkable places are critical to cities and the national economy and here’s a formula to get them back on track.
    Walkable urban places (WalkUPs) have been declining since 2019 due to the pandemic, rising disorder (or its perception), and a shrinking office market—but a new nationwide report says a virtuous cycle can be restored by rebalancing real estate and uses. Reiminaging Cities: Disrupting the Urban Doom...Read more

  • The housing shortage and structural costs of sprawl

    This graph shows why housing is getting so expensive. Annual housing production in the US plummeted in the 2010s, with annual single-family construction just over half of what it was in the 2000s, according to a report Top Cities for Real Estate Development . Although multifamily held its ground in...Read more

  • A vision for repairing rural sprawl

    Planning an acupunctural approach to repairing a sprawling plan from the 1950s, using urbanism principles.
    Cherokee Village is an odd and interesting community in the Ozarks of north Arkansas. In the 1950s, it was planned as a vast retirement community, platted for a population of 60,000. The road network, golf courses, and reservoirs for waterfront home sites were built, although most of the...Read more