• Spokane streamlines ‘missing middle’ housing

    A house plan catalog is designed to expedite construction of compact housing that fits the neighborhood context throughout the city.
    Spokane, Washington, is moving forward with highly streamlined approvals for a catalog of “missing middle” building plans in response to rising housing costs. The city of 228,000 people, where home prices increased substantially in recent years, officially declared a “housing emergency” last summer...Read more

  • Changing street design is critical to reducing bike-ped deaths

    Planner and author Jeff Speck argues that efforts to make our streets and roadways safer will fail unless the traffic engineering profession reforms its design practices.
    The US is experiencing “a grave upswing of roadway deaths,” and that trend is most pronounced among pedestrians and bicyclists, according to Jeff Speck. “Cycling deaths are up 44 percent over the past decade, and pedestrian deaths have risen a stunning 82 percent since 2009 — and that in the...Read more

  • Trenton closer to long-sought freeway removal

    Plan would open up the New Jersey capital's riverfront and offer economic, social, and environmental benefits.
    Urbanism is a long-term activity that plays out over generations. That’s especially true of major infrastructure like freeways—and Route 29 in Trenton, New Jersey, is a great example. In 1989, two young architects, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who would go on to help found CNU, drew a...Read more

  • Analysis proposes ‘20-minute suburb’

    An analysis by SOM argues that the suburbs are urbanizing as a result of shifting markets and people moving out of cities in the Bay Area of California. The firm examined what it called the “20-minute suburb,” based on the 15-minute city idea, to show how suburbs could transform around town centers...Read more