• Honoring neighborhood history, building a garden

    Winthrop Family Historical Garden redesigns an underutilized green space as a beautiful garden and public gathering spot in Chicago, Illinois. MKSK won a 2024 CNU Charter Award in the Block, Street, and Building category.
    In a walkable, growing neighborhood in the Northside of Chicago, a community garden tells an important historical narrative while providing a multi-use gathering space. Due to restrictive covenants, the 4600 block of Winthrop Avenue was the only area of the Uptown neighborhood where Black residents...Read more

  • Fighting loneliness through community design

    As the problem of loneliness grows, urbanists and planners may successfully design for social interaction in three broad ways.
    America is suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, according to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy. One in two adults report experiencing loneliness, he explains, and the numbers are highest among young adults (79 percent of those aged 18-24 report feeling lonely). Loneliness has profound implications...Read more

  • Community fosters social life through civic design

    A new town in Alabama is a model for how community planning and institutions can connect people.
    Healthy communities need formal and informal civic sites and institutions that promote social interaction for humans to thrive, argues Seth Kaplan in his recently published book Fragile Neighborhoods . Physical design that includes town centers and gathering spaces helps meet that need...Read more

  • Designing gathering spaces in a car-oriented city

    A new urbanist development named after a literary hometown focuses on the arts and much-needed public space.
    Newport News, Virginia, is a city of 186,000 people where downtown is hard to find. The area that Google identifies as the heart of Newport News is an office/industrial park. The traditional center at the city's south end, on the James River waterfront, primarily consists of parking lots and single...Read more