• The good news on desegregation

    The data shows that neighborhoods across America are becoming more racially diverse—despite some reports of persistent segregation.
    Its rare that some obscure terminology from sociology becomes a part of our everyday vernacular, but “tipping point” is one of those terms. Famously, Thomas Schelling used the tipping point metaphor to explain the dynamics of residential segregation in the United States. His thesis was that white...Read more

  • 'Good bones' are a key to strong communities

    Grids are easy and inexpensive—they are a natural way to design streets. But the convention for much of the last century is to model streets on sewer systems.
    A body without good bones will fall apart. And as many of us have come to realize, streets are the bones of communities. A community that lacks good streets will suffer—in its economy, its social well-being, and its health. When people who study cities and towns say that a place “has good bones,”...Read more

  • Suburbs opt for urban streetscapes

    Some suburbs are building an entire urban downtown from scratch to provide a unique identity and appeal.
    Many suburbs are retrofitting to include walkable urbanism, but a few are building an entire urban downtown from scratch. The Fall 2016 edition of Development Magazine , published by the NAIOP, the national commercial real estate association, reports on three municipalities across the nation that...Read more

  • From parking lot to urban tour-de-force

    Urban design and architecture on a leftover parcel bring a campus and a Los Angeles neighborhood closer together.
    For the University of California in Los Angeles, UCLA Weyburn is more than just graduate student housing. The 500-unit apartment block and community building ties together a fragmented part of the university’s campus, realizing the vision of a thirty-year-old master plan. Built on what was formerly...Read more