• How art launched New Urbanism, changing planning history

    The Art of the New Urbanism is more than a beautiful book—it tells the story of an urban planning movement through the lens of its drawing skills.
    When the New Urbanism began thirty-some years ago, its practitioners faced a steep uphill battle. Zoning codes across the US made it illegal to build walkable places (more so than today). The real estate finance system was heavily weighted towards single-use, suburban development. Traffic engineers...Read more

  • The power of an imaginative illustration

    Three decades ago, a man with a pen proposed a park in downtown Providence, showing that artists can be powerful planners.
    DPZ CoDesign conducted a charrette in downtown Providence , Rhode Island, in 1992, sponsored by the City and the Coalition for Community Development. The talented artist Charles Barrett, who passed away in 1996, worked for DPZ. As described in the recently published The Art of the New Urbanism (...Read more

  • Leon Krier’s checklist

    The late architect and urban theorist wrote a to-do list for city founders, mayors, administrators, designers, settlers, and landowners.
    Leon Krier, who died last week , had definite ideas about city design and its details, large and small. Reprinted below is Krier’s checklist for community design and implementation, written for the Prince’s Foundation (now the King’s Foundation) in 2020. The publication Walkability and Mixed-Use:...Read more

  • Competition reveals practical single-stair designs

    CNU Mid-Atlantic’s Baltimore Single-Stair Design Competition shows the value of single-stair types in mid-rise buildings on infill sites, but more work needs to be done.
    Note: The results of this competition will be presented at CNU 33 in Providence, Rhode Island, on Friday, June 13, at 2:30 p.m. On a sweltering Saturday evening in Downtown Baltimore, over thirty built environment enthusiasts gathered for an event dedicated to building code reform, the awards...Read more