"Half of the work of urban design is deciding where to store cars."
"When designing parking spaces, planners have a size of vehicle in mind—a design vehicle scaled for highway and freeway travel. Yet almost half of all car trips in the United States are for trips under 3 miles,1 which shouldn’t require getting on a highway or freeway. In an era of growing climate threats, we need to rethink what kind of vehicle is necessary for running local trips. It’s time to seriously consider a class of vehicles called neighborhood electric vehicles, or NEVs."
"Seed bombs, the "tree lady of Brooklyn," and the roots of urban gardening."
"New York City looked a lot different in the 1960s and 1970s. A sharp economic decline and white flight meant there was mass disinvestment and urban decay, particularly in the city’s lower-income neighborhoods. It’s what Hattie Carthan and Liz Christy noticed in their communities when they each set out to revive their neighborhoods by making them greener. Ultimately, their radical acts of gardening would transform the landscape across New York City."
"Explore what makes trees a vital part of cities, and how urban spaces throughout history have embraced the importance of trees."
"By 2050, it’s estimated that over 65% of the world will be living in cities. We may think of nature as being unconnected to our urban spaces, but trees have always been an essential part of successful cities. Humanity has been uncovering these arboreal benefits since the creation of our first cities thousands of years ago. So what makes trees so important to a city’s survival?"
"A major city portrayed in miniature, this short film was shot in Vancouver over a single year from many stunning vantage points. Visually spellbinding, it has an intuitive sense of the cadences of urban life and provides a different perspective on what it means to live in a great metropolis."
"Walkability" is a word urbanists throw around, often with different ideas as to what it really means, or why we care about it. As a literal descriptor, being “walkable” simply means a place can be walked, in the same sense that “readable” means it can be read. There are different levels of walkability just as how asentencewithoutspaces is still readable, just less readable than a sentence with spaces."
"To measure if a trip is walkable, there are four factors we should consider: safety, distance, convenience, and comfort."
"Less than a decade ago, Water Valley, Mississippi was a forgotten small town: there were 18 empty storefronts lining its four-block Main Street and plenty of decaying homes for sale. Located only twenty miles from the University of Mississippi and the pricey town of Oxford (also former home to William Faulkner), it was well-placed for revival.
In 2002, Mickey Howley and his wife Ole Miss professor Annette Trefzer bought an $80,000 century-old home and one of those empty storefronts for $60,000. They were early pioneers in the effort to rehabilitate the old 19th Century railroad town- turning their former drugstore into the Bozarts art gallery, but it took the formation of a community to create real change.
“In the last seven years,” explained Howley- now director of the Water Valley Main Street Association - in 2015 to a White House meeting on rural placemaking, “and remember Water Valley is 3,500 people with a four-block long downtown, this team has been instrumental in bringing 88 new jobs to downtown. Adding 26 new businesses. Fixing buildings and I don’t just mean façade jobs, but major renovations in 29 buildings. Adding 14 upper floor apartments. In that new business mix, we’ve added four new restaurants, three art galleries, one grocery store, one doctor’s office, and one brewery.”
Howley calls it “reimagining” structures: a foundry is now a brewery, a service station is now a restaurant, a drugstore is now an art gallery and a department store is now a grocery store/school."
