• Healing small cities through land use and transportation

    On the Park Bench experts reveal how to overcome barriers to healthy, thriving cities in America’s heartland.
    “We don’t know how. It costs too much. It won’t work here.” These three objections are raised by public officials when confronted with the need to reform land use and transportation, according to Mark Fenton, who presented on CNU’s On the Park Bench webinar Healing Small Cities . Fenton and co-...Read more

  • A wall rises in Buffalo

    Even a city that is getting better makes mistakes, such as a massive concrete wall around a development in a city where population and urbanism are growing.
    In early March, 2020, days before the entire nation came to a sudden pandemic halt, I was in Buffalo, New York, for a charrette co-sponsored by CNU. It was brutally cold—as Buffalo can be in winter—and that may have contributed to my poor judgment (it’s hard to think clearly about urbanism when...Read more

  • How physical activity, land use, transportation, and zoning intersect

    Zoning rarely gets discussed as directly related to health, but communities that have reformed their codes see health benefits, from reduced rates of cancer to greater physical activity—which in turn lowers disease and improves mental health.
    In an On the Park Bench webinar, Jamie Chriqui, PhD, reports on the intersection of physical activity, land use and transportation, and zoning. This matters because half of the US population is physically inactive (more prevalent in the Sunbelt), and inactive people are far more likely to have...Read more

  • Ways to jump-start small-scale urbanism

    The benefits to good urbanism of finer grain building and development are well known, according to Brian Falk of the Project for Lean Urbanism. Now there are a suite of tools to help make that happen, including Pink Zones and “ house hacking .” Falk and architect Kevin Klinkenberg joined CNU’s On...Read more