• The power of central social districts

    Main Streets, downtown cores, and neighborhood centers play a vital social role in American communities. The argument for Central Social Districts is that this social role should be nurtured distinctly for urban centers to succeed.
    Public Square editor Robert Steuteville interviewed economic development expert N. David Milder of DANTH, Inc., on Central Social Districts. Milder wrote a paper that was recently published in the American Downtown Revitalization Review . This is Part 1 of a two-part interview. RS: What is a...Read more

  • Vision of a town: Celebration of the physical planner

    US Route 20, the longest road in the nation, travels through many interesting and historic places in New York State. One that you have probably never heard of is Cazenovia, a town of 7,000 people, founded in 1793. Cazenovia is a kind of place that you stumble on to, and, if you are an urbanist, you...Read more

  • New Urbanism in America’s heartland

    Uptown Normal is helping to bring a small downtown back to life, providing an economic boost to a town in Central Illinois.
    When I was tracking neighborhood-scale new urbanist projects in the early 2000s, Uptown Normal in the Town of Normal, Illinois, was just breaking ground. Planned by Farr Associates of Chicago, Uptown Normal was a different kind of traditional neighborhood development than I was used to seeing at...Read more

  • The 15-minute city is the new 5-minute walk

    Proximity and human-scale are still vitally important for sustainability, and yet the geography of our lives has gotten bigger. That is why we need the 15-minute city.
    Why is the 15-minute city important? The 15-minute city is to the 21st Century what the 5-minute walk was to the 19th and early 20th centuries. I realized this after reading a history of my neighborhood, Fall Creek in Ithaca, New York . Because the neighborhood hasn’t physically changed that much...Read more