2016 Groves Award Winner

We’d like to help celebrate this year’s Groves Award Winner! Andy Blake, City Manager for the City of Ranson, West Virginia, will receive the 2016 Groves Award, given annually by the Congress for the New Urbanism and the Transect Codes Council to recognize outstanding leadership and vision in the promotion of Transect-based planning.

Read More

Benchmarks: Places on the move measure up

As spring tempts us to pick up the pace of our outdoor activities, it’s clear that not all places have equal footing. Those well-positioned to draw us out into health-boosting active transportation are enjoying all sorts of benefits. City planners across North America are trying hard to even the playing field. The 2016 Benchmarking Report…

Read More

Retail: Walkable urban primer with southwest inspiration

A couple weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of working with Bob Gibbs in Las Cruces, New Mexico, looking at ways to help downtown outperform the suburbs, helping Main Street be more profitable than strip malls. The top lessons were to nurture unique historic character in walkable formats and don’t build leasable space that…

Read More

Making Sense of Community

Let’s start at the beginning. Sense of community is a legitimate thing. Or at least it was, until people like me got ahold of it. To explain: In 1986, social psychologists David W. McMillan and David M. Chavis published their theory on what they termed “sense of community” — the feeling we experience when engaged…

Read More

Makers Gonna Make: makerspace v2

Do you have the hands-on gene? If not, the hottest new topic in neurology – epigenetics – suggests that your environment may tweak your genetic tendencies. If you find yourself in a place conducive to creative experimentation, you may just have to put your hands on something. The burgeoning makerspace movement is all about imagination…

Read More