New Urbanism

Single-Family Houses: A Smart Growth Strategy

Single family homes are a smart growth strategy as long they are planned and developed, well, smartly.

Sunday’s New York Times features a story by Shaila Dewan asking, “Is Suburban Sprawl on the Way Back?”  Answer: not really, although highly compact urban development is hardly going to dominate, either.  The best quote from the whole piece comes from Smart Growth America President Geoff Anderson, who correctly observed, The market isn’t all for smart growth, …

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Has New Urbanism Killed Land Use Law?

My Land Use casebook, like most of them, mentions New Urbanist zoning and planning techniques, but does not dwell on them.  In order to teach New Urbanist concepts such as Form-Based Codes, SmartCode, and the Transect, I had to develop my own materials, as well as shamelessly stealing a couple of Powerpoint presentations from a friend who …

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Jane Jacobs, Edmund Burke, and the New Urbanism

Jason Epstein’s Introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities makes this powerful intellectual connection: Death and Life … [is] about the dynamics of civilization, how vital economies and their societies are formed, elaborated, and sustained, and the forces that thwart and ruin them…Her sympathies are with the …

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The Golden Anniversary of Death and Life

I’m happily addicted to audiobooks.  Anyone from Los Angeles really should be, because getting the best ones means that a traffic jam isn’t a waste of time: it’s just an opportunity to read a few more chapters!  And even those with short commutes could profitable make their way through lots of good books if they …

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