GREAT IDEAS
Great idea: Sustainable urbanism
The trend toward complete communities shapes the debate on sustainability and environmentalism, and vice-versa.
Great idea: Pedestrian shed and the 5-minute walk
Pedestrian sheds are a foundational idea of designing cohesive communities, but the challenge is the gap between what planners know and developers are building.
Great Idea: Building better suburbs through retrofit
Suburbs are becoming more diverse and connected to meet the needs of Americans of all ages in the 21st Century.
Great idea: Tactical urbanism
The latest trend in urban design and planning gets them off of the paper and out of a big room, testing ideas in the real world. It is fun and hands-on, and making many converts.
Great idea: Multidisciplinary design charrette
A time-compressed design process that gathers all of the stakeholders and practitioners together has great potential for creating more holistic communities, experts say.
Great idea: Shock and awe for cities and towns
Charles Marohn of Strong Towns and Joe Minicozzi of Urban3 have been sounding the alarm across America about the financial unsustainability of fragmented development patterns and conventional suburban infrastructure.
Great idea: Cottages for emergency and permanent affordable housing
The cute Katrina Cottage has proven the versatility and usefulness of cottages that are designed to fit into complete neighborhoods.
Great idea: Interconnected street networks
In order to get good streets, you have to think beyond any single street—an idea that is at the core of New Urbanism. Dendritic networks lead to fragmented and dispersed land uses.
Great idea: Architecture that puts the city first
"The prime ingredient of urbanism is really public space and the public realm. So the urban plan comes first and the building second."
Great idea: Transit-oriented development
Transit-oriented development links transportation and land use—providing people with maximum choice in how to get around by intensifying activities near transit nodes with high quality public space.
Great idea: Missing middle housing
Increasingly in demand today, missing middle housing forms the backbone of the quintessential American neighborhood.
Great idea: Traditional neighborhood development
Creating holistic neighborhoods from scratch was one of the first and still effective strategies of the New Urbanism.
Great idea: Incremental development
Great places are built in small increments, and urbanists are restoring America's know-how and capacity for small-scale development by many individuals in their own communities. Do you want to be a small developer?
Great idea: The rural-to-urban Transect
The New Urbanism brought the environmental transect methodology into planning and development of human-scale, complete communities. Now the human habitat can be analyzed as a continuum with the natural world.
Great idea: Charter of the New Urbanism
A set of principles that are clear and generative provide a solid foundation for the New Urbanism. Those principles have withstood the test of time and empirical research, and they can be implemented in countless ways.
Great idea: Mixed-use urban centers
The market is much more receptive to the benefits of mixed-use today, but it is still easier to talk about main street retail than to effectively build it.
Great idea: Form-based codes
New urban codes have allowed cities and towns to code for complete neighborhoods and public spaces as shared-use places.
Great idea: Light Imprint for walkable green infrastructure
A leaner, lighter approach to infrastucture is more cost-effective, sustainable, and livable—an idea worth considering for America in National Infrastructure Week.
Great idea: Lean Urbanism
Lean Urbanism seeks to bring common sense back into the planning and development process—because great neighborhoods are built with many hands, often in small increments.
Great idea: Rethinking parking
From coast to coast and in middle America, more sensible parking policies are taking hold and may be the quickest path to urban revitalization.
Great idea: The public realm
More and more people are appreciating that architecture and urban design of streets and public spaces have the power to connect, engage, and inspire all of us.
Great idea: Public housing that engages the city
Public housing in the form of complete or partial neighborhoods started with HOPE VI and became standard practice, impacting the lives of people in cities and towns across America.
Great Idea: Context-based street design
Building thoroughfares as places of beauty and social interaction requires a context-based approach to design.
Great idea: The polycentric region
Market and local government support for new urbanist values is rising and that is changing the planning mindset in many regions.
25 great ideas of the New Urbanism
The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a...
Great Idea: Freeways Without Futures
Reducing state and federal infrastructure costs while boosting local economies by strengthening urban places is a win-win from in-city freeway transformation.