• Financial fragility is to blame for Jackson’s water crisis

    Note: This article first appeared on Strong Towns .​ Public Square editor Robert Steuteville is on leave through the last week of October. I’ve spent some time trying to understand what has happened with the water system in Jackson, Mississippi. For locals who have lived through the long unfolding...Read more

  • Santa Barbara awarded for affordable housing design

    The first Gindroz Award is named in honor CNU’s former board chair, a pioneer in applying new urban principles to social housing.
    Santa Barbara’s public and affordable housing looks different from any that you are likely to encounter in any other city. Derived from the city’s Mediterranean and Spanish-revival architecture, the housing serves low-income residents, the formerly homeless, other vulnerable populations, and those...Read more

  • Eye-opening video shows church site reuse

    Creating intimate spaces within blocks could be the answer for some underutilized house of worship sites—as shown by a plan for catholic churches in a midwestern city.
    The US is facing a tremendous and growing number of church properties that are in need of better utilization or reuse . A plan and video for two catholic churches in South Bend, Indiana, shows how such properties might enable new urban placemaking of a high order while preserving the houses of...Read more

  • The new urbanist developer King

    Charles III, who ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom late last week, may be the only world leader who has personally built a successful mixed-use, walkable town.
    “It is impossible to find another housing estate built in the past quarter century that is as richly textured, as intricate, as convincing as a whole, and which is getting better not worse with age” wrote architect Ben Pentreath in The Financial Times , of Poundbury in Dorchester, England. The...Read more