• 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

  • Announcing the 2016 Charter Award Winners

    "The 2016 Grand Prize went to Brush Park Parcels A+B, a neighborhood development project adjacent to downtown Detroit that combined historic preservation, human-scaled design, and cutting-edge architecture."
    Last week at #CNU24 in Detroit, we unveiled the winners of our 15th annual Charter Awards —the year’s greatest achievements in architectural, landscape, urban, and regional design. Among the eleven winners and six runners-up were a jazz cultural center in New Orleans, a military barracks turned...Read more