One of the great mysteries of my adult life has been trying to understand why nobody builds lovely places anymore. How hard can it be? Our ancestors built amazing cities with little more than horses, hand tools, and human muscle.
Defining the 15-minute city The “15-minute city” may be defined as an ideal geography where most human needs and many desires are located within a travel distance of 15 minutes. Here’s what that means. ANDRES DUANY, ROBERT STEUTEVILLE FEB. 8, 2021 The 15-minute city is gaining significant traction politically and in planning circles, but what does it…
The Storefront Accelerator By Jaime J. Izurieta Your storefront can make you money. Odds are it is not and you are wasting a great opportunity. Design brings people into your store. It attracts new customers and tells them what your business is about. Once inside, it guides them to what you want them to see. Most…
Why does social life matter so much for our sustainable future? And what does the future of our planet have to do with our sidewalks?
Imagine if the places where we live were shaped by our social lives, re-imagined to make it easy for us to gather, shop, have fun, eat together, and meet new people. With this mindset, we would fundamentally change our communities. Maybe this vision is closer than we think: Perhaps, all we have to do to bring this to life is start with the sidewalks.
Over two years ago, Barcelona set the transportation world aflutter when it announced it would be attempting to reinvent parts of its city by developing a Superblock system by transforming targeted street grids to prioritize people over cars. On selected small street networks large parts of intersections and roadways would be taken back for parks and community gathering. Vehicles would not be banned, but it would redesign the grids so that fast thru-traffic was discouraged thru a series of driving direction changes, street narrowing and speed limits. Thus, almost all vehicles present would be either local residents or people with personal business on those streets.
Once obsolete, these staples of city life are making a comeback Until just a few years ago, a ‘capilé’ would have been as unfamiliar to Lisbonites as to those outside of Portugal. Once a staple local tipple, made from maidenhair fern leaf syrup and essence of orange blossom, it slipped out of people’s consciousness as…
Manual for rebuilding community health & opportunity post-COVID This Pandemic Toolkit is a distillation of an ongoing, crowd-sourced compilation of reality-tested strategies to help local and regional governments respond to challenges imposed by COVID-19, but also to help become more resilient in the face of future pandemics. The Toolkit is organized by action steps related…
A recently built accessory dwelling in a new urban subdivision in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Source: Mission Heights development. ROBERT STEUTEVILLE AUG. 30, 2018 Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a rapidly growing city—the largest in Northwest Arkansas, a region with major corporate headquarters including Walmart, and a major research university in the University of Arkansas. Fayetteville is a low-density city…
Oxnard has a severe housing shortage. Earlier this year SB 827 attempted to help communities build more housing. If the direction of SB 827 is correct the “fixes” relate mostly to zoning that incentives sprawl and makes it almost impossible to build in city cores. I will not go into the failure of SB 827…
“Brilliant podcast on placemaking, public policy, planning departments and the public. I cannot recommend this podcast highly enough.” Editor. JULY 26, 2018 BY STRONG TOWNS This is our sixth dispatch from the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), which took place in Savannah, Georgia in May. Chuck Marohn attended CNU and hosted a series of in-depth podcast conversations…