• ‘Car-free’ development breaks ground in Arizona

    Large mixed-use apartment complex in the midst of suburbia will be laid out like a European village with architecture appropriate to the southwestern desert.
    It’s not very often that a planned new urban community gets national coverage in the Wall Street Journal , Forbes , and Fast Company , among other publications. Yet that’s the case with the 16-acre Culdesac Tempe (something of a misnomer because the project has no cul-de-sacs—not in the common...Read more

  • Cities are like brains—immense networks of connective tissue

    Intriguing lessons for urbanists are coming, surprisingly, from neuroscience. Understanding the underlying structure of cities can help us to formulate better urban policies and practices.
    Urbanists have long been drawing lessons from other disciplines, including sociology, environmental psychology and ecology. Now there are intriguing new lessons being offered by a perhaps surprising field: brain science. But to explore the story of those lessons, we'll have to start first with...Read more

  • Changes in retail encourage walkable urban designs

    For many years, retailers resisted the architecture of street-facing storefronts, but necessity is the mother of flexibility.
    This is one of a series of ongoing Public Square articles on the market, technological, and cultural transformation of the $5 trillion retail industry—and how it relates to a continued shift toward walkable, urban living. When America switched from urban downtowns and main streets to suburban...Read more

  • Harvard to New Urbanism: A bit of long-due respect

    Review of City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present, by Alex Krieger, Harvard University Press, 2019.
    For 30 years there’s been an unwritten rule at Harvard—and many elite US universities that follow Harvard’s lead—“keep your distance from the New Urbanism.” Twenty years ago, Harvard held a series of events that were framed as debates between new urbanists and Harvard faculty and students. These...Read more