• 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

  • Plight of the family-owned store

    Philip Langdon’s Common\Edge article , The Precarious State of the Mom-and-Pop Store , highlights the beauty of, and challenges facing, an American tradition. “Mom and pop” stores have been under economic pressure for many decades due to suburbanization and the proliferation of national chains. The...Read more

  • The college campus to New Urbanist pipeline

    American college campuses play a major role in young people coming to understand the importance of walkability and bikeability in their communities. For many, living on a college campus is the first time they truly live somewhere with adequate and safe pedestrian infrastructure with services...Read more