• Walkable downtown created from a suburban office complex

    Doral, known for a golf course and sprawl, has partnered with a developer to create a walkable downtown on the site of a former nondescript office park, reusing existing infrastructure.
    When incorporated 20 years ago, Doral, Florida, consisted of a collection of gated subdivisions, shopping centers, warehouse and industrial districts, a world-renowned golf course, and notoriously clogged arterial roads, according to DPZ CoDesign. There was no downtown or walkable neighborhood of...Read more

  • Innovative village based on agrarian urbanism

    A mixed-use plan for a Central Florida blueberry farm seeks to build a sense of place around agricultural production, using Seaside as an urban design model.
    A blueberry farm in Groveland, Florida, has been designed for development as a village while maintaining current food production levels. The Lake Catherine Farms plan utilizes agrarian urbanism, where a mixed-use place maintains intensive agriculture on a portion of the land, while incorporating an...Read more

  • CNUers rank among most influential urbanists, past and present

    The Planetizen list of top all-time urbanists confirms the outsized influence of new urbanist ideas among planners at the moment.
    Planetizen came out with a periodically updated list of the all-time most influential urbanists . I can’t take this list too seriously and the rankings may cause considerable head-scratching (What do those ranked above Vitruvius, downgraded to number 67 , think? If I could wager who on the list...Read more

  • Florida’s success with context-based street classification

    If context-based street design works in the most automobile-dominated state, it can make a difference anywhere.
    Attempts to create walkable places become an order of magnitude more difficult when state-owned thoroughfares are involved. The laudable goal of creating a human-scale neighborhood may descend into a multiyear battle—sometimes won by planners, more often by the engineers—and the outcome is nearly...Read more