• Why new urbanism is the answer all over again

    The ground-up movement which helped defeat urban decay in the 1980s is just as relevant now our cities face the opposite problem.
    This week in Seattle the members of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) gather in Seattle on the 25th anniversary of their first meeting in Alexandria, Virginia. The congress burst on to the scene in the early nineties, after a period when cities were excoriated as unsafe, and perhaps in...Read more

  • Is placemaking a 'new environmentalism?'

    If our approach to environmentalism should be "new," so too should our approach to urbanism.
    Can placemaking – in short, the building or strengthening of physical community fabric to create great human habitat – be a “new environmentalism”? The question is posed by a provocative short essay , which I first discovered in 2011. Written by Ethan Kent of the Project for Public Spaces, the...Read more

  • How can we accelerate local code reform? Act more like the Tortoise, less like the Hare

    The goal of CNU's Project for Code Reform is to bring coding innovations to 42,000 units of local government to enable complete communities.
    Across the country, many small and mid-sized cities and towns are looking for ways to foster greater Main Street and downtown development, redevelopment, and revitalization. One barrier to these efforts is local codes and ordinances, which are the very DNA of what makes—or breaks—a place. Zoning,...Read more

  • The urban anxieties of Richard Florida

    Grass-roots revitalization is taking place in many American cities, an antidote to the "winner takes all urbanism" described in The New Urban Crisis.
    When Richard Florida burst onto the North American scene nearly 20 years ago, he did so with a sunny urban vision. His breakthrough book, The Rise of the Creative Class , asserted that a growing class of knowledge workers, techies, artists, and other creative people was gravitating toward city...Read more