• Cultivating community: Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good

    Success is people consciously working together, putting differences aside in pursuit of higher quality of life, and getting something done.
    Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all...Read more

  • Why climate change is now front and center

    The most critical opportunity for urbanists is to step up to the magnitude of the climate challenge.
    25 years ago, many of us we were in this same room, having already spent four years talking and planning for the first congress. We assembled a coalition of interested but uncertain allies and curious onlookers, all drawn to the potential opportunity to confront and combat suburban sprawl. At that...Read more

  • The infinite suburb? They must be joking

    In their visions of the future, the elite graduate schools of urban planning lately see a new-and-improved suburbia, based on self-driving electric cars, “drone deliveries at your doorstep,” and “teardrop-shaped one-way roads” (I think that means cul-de-sacs) as the coming sure thing. It sounds...Read more

  • 25 great ideas of the New Urbanism

    The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have...Read more