• Community fosters social life through civic design

    A new town in Alabama is a model for how community planning and institutions can connect people.
    Healthy communities need formal and informal civic sites and institutions that promote social interaction for humans to thrive, argues Seth Kaplan in his recently published book Fragile Neighborhoods . Physical design that includes town centers and gathering spaces helps meet that need...Read more

  • Connected streets are needed to support mixed-use, study reports

    A study looks at hierarchical and interconnected street networks, concluding that you can't have effective mixed-use without street grids, which provide many benefits.
    Nearly all local land-use comprehensive plans nowadays call for mixed-use and walkability, but they often lack specific instructions on streets to enable those outcomes. A study in the Journal of Geotechnical and Transportation Engineering claims that well-connected street networks—e.g., street...Read more

  • Growing cultural life and mobility in a small city

    Railyard Park in Rogers is the central public space the city has always lacked—providing a place for diverse activities and people, connected to a regional trail network.
    The City of Rogers was founded as a railroad service depot in Benton County, Arkansas, during the 1880s. In 1950, the town still had only 5,000 people. Nearby, Sam Walton started a retail chain in the 1960s that would spur massive growth and forever change the rural town. Now, Rogers is a small...Read more

  • Successful cities know their stories

    First+Main Films and the Better Cities Film Festival are telling civic stories across America in film, with the goal of changing cities. It shows the power of storytelling in urbanism.
    Cities and towns in the US have gone through a process of “de-narration,” according to the filmmakers at First+Main Films. Communities have lost historic fabric, the storytelling capacity of local newspapers, generational continuity, and geographically cohesive families over the last five or six...Read more