• A dead mall becomes a downtown for a sprawling suburb

    Although Lakewood, Colorado, is the fifth largest city in the state, until the last decade the city had no true downtown. Instead, the Denver suburb boasted one of the country’s largest indoor shopping malls, built in the 1960s—but by 2000, that mall was largely vacant. That mall has been converted...Read more

  • The real cost of six million people in a suburban swamp

    The recent deluge that inundated Houston and left it looking like Bangladesh reveals the myopia that distorts Joel Kotkin’s latest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us . A stalwart defender of drivable suburbanism, Houston is Kotkin’s poster child, “America’s Opportunity City.” What he...Read more

  • ‘Walkable urban’ dominates US commercial development

    Mixed-use, walkable commercial development is outpacing large-scale conventional suburban construction in every major metro area, according to the new report Foot Traffic Ahead : Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros, 2016 . For perhaps the first time in 60 years, walkable urban...Read more

  • Better streets are worth fighting for

    Sadik-Khan's approach is both radical and practical. Instead of relying on traffic "models" that are rarely tested against reality, she made changes with temporary materials that could be reversed if the benefits failed to materialize.
    Janette Sadik-Khan, author of the recent Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution and former New York City transportation commissioner, gave an inspiring speech to CNU in Detroit on Friday. The speech was not officially recorded on video, but here I offer her 2013 Ted video that has been...Read more