• The infrastructure choice

    A postcard sketch competition asked Urban Guild members to draw some ideas in a few minutes during an evening gathering at the Guild Summit in Chattanooga in late October. The members include architects, urban designers, and other urbanists. The winner was Anthony Catania of AMC Architecture &...Read more

  • New Urban Update: IncDev in Gaza, Tom Low, Charter Awards, Shoup, and Brussat

    I have been working on a Climate Action Handbook for CNU, which we plan to have published and printed by CNU 34 in Northwest Arkansas, but in doing so, I took a break from Public Square for a month and a half. There's a backlog of stories, some of which I present here under “New Urban Update.” I...Read more

  • Chattanooga is chugging along

    Four decades of public-nonprofit-private partnership in New Urbanism has produced a city in balance, moving forward.
    I was recently in Chattanooga, one of the first cities in America to be transformed by New Urbanism. An industrial city and railroad hub (celebrated by Glenn Miller’s “Chattanooga Choo-Choo”), the City was in economic and demographic free-fall by the latter part of the 20 th Century. But...Read more

  • Proposed: A new California city

    California Forever in the Central Valley offers an opportunity to test walkable community-building on a scale we haven’t seen in a century.
    At the first Congress for the New Urbanism in Alexandria, Virginia, in 1993, planning Professor Robert Fishman described the concept of “mass suburbia” taking hold in America in the years after World War II. A synonym is “sprawl.” New urbanists have described the physical characteristics of sprawl...Read more