Starbucks built its brand on being a third place — a communal hangout that fosters communication and conversation — but in recent years, its priorities have shifted to speed of service. Now, instead of returning to its roots, the corporation is trying to redefine what a third place is.
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We’ve created a society in which families have to choose between either spread-out, single-family living or dense urban living—and each side of this (artificial) binary can come with upsides and downsides.
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The winds are shifting for cities. Are you paying attention?
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How does the suburban development pattern present itself in a smaller island space, versus in the contiguous United States?
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The trajectory of these Jersey supermarkets is a microcosm of how the suburban experiment altered small towns, turning them from tiny cities into suburban lifestyle accouterments.
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As people interested in undoing damage caused by the rise of the suburban development pattern, how should we feel about so-called “McMain Streets”?
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In this Not Just Bikes video, Jason Slaughter explains how raising children in the suburbs significantly restricts their ability to be independent.
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In the realm of urban planning, there’s plenty of discourse out there about housing affordability—but what about household wealth building?
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We tend to choose larger homes than we want our neighbors to choose. The result: suburban-style development that doesn't match what people actually want from their communities.
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These two highways in New Jersey run parallel and very close to each other—and traveling along them allows a sustained view of two different development approaches.
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A recent Vice article seems to suggest that most Americans don’t want more walkable places. Here’s why that takeaway is totally wrong.
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The New York Times (among others) is speculating that COVID-19 will spur a massive exodus from cities. These claims are based on two very dubious assumptions.
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Locals call it “the worst planning mistake in Minneapolis history.” Now that it’s going away, what must planners (and the public) do to avoid replacing it with another one?
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Most Americans have never lived in a time when “the inner city” wasn’t a locus of poverty, physical blight and social disintegration. Yet many of us fail to grasp the extent to which public policy had its thumb on the scale from the start in creating those conditions.
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No name better symbolizes idyllic 1950s suburbia than Levittown. How these massive, master-planned communities—the epitome of America’s suburban experiment—have fared over 70 years tells a less rosy story.
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A bill that has passed the Florida Senate proposes to build over 300 miles of new toll roads deep into rural areas of the state. Proponents claim it’s necessary to prepare for coming population growth. They couldn’t be more wrong.
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Now that my city’s downtown is starting to thrive, we’re facing a new problem: a barrage of attempts to move centrally-located public facilities to unwalkable, suburban (and even undeveloped) areas.
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The discipline of not acquiring more until we've wrung true value out of what we already possess can make our lives richer and fuller. And this is a lesson we need to apply to our cities as well.
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Rust Belt cities have endured difficult losses, and no matter how hard they’ve tried, they have never quite been able to shake the financial and psychological wounds. So today, we’re taking the American city to therapy.
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How one city made a grave mistake when it let itself be defined as a place people pass through, or one they leave every morning to go somewhere else. And how it could start to undo that mistake.
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