• The beauty of 25-foot urbanism

    These photos of Over-the-Rhine in Cincinnati were taken and assembled by architect Tom Low . These 4- and 5-story masonry buildings were built circa 1900 on 25-wide lots—a standard American system of platting. They all have interesting detail on the ground floor and walk-up stairs inside as well as...Read more

  • New Urbanism is far from dead—but it is evolving

    The folks who brought us walkable downtowns and transit-oriented development have a new challenge to tackle: climate change.
    New Urbanism is dead, writes Bill Fulton on the October issue of Governing . Fulton, director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, says New Urbanist thinking has so thoroughly permeated the mainstream that it no longer needs a movement to champion it. Not so fast. Today,...Read more

  • Transect of incremental urbanism

    When you have a chicken and egg problem, have a chicken omelette.
    The term " missing middle " is widely used to describe small-scale, incremental housing development, but what about the commercial element that helps make a neighborhood attractive? Many experts advise that a certain number of "rooftops" are needed for commercial development, which leaves a chicken...Read more

  • The 5 'Cs' of community planning

    Complete, compact, connected, complex, and convivial describes everything that you want a neighborhood to be.
    The source of most conflicts and confusion I see occurring when cities update their Community Plans is due to the confusion over the scale and size difference of a ‘Community’ versus a ‘Neighborhood’ unit. A community is defined as, “a group of people living in the same place or having a particular...Read more