Making a Cool City

04/05/2019

Who doesn't want good restaurants in their neighborhood?

Good restaurants are essential to neighborhood success, and here are four reasons why.

03/30/2019

What an interesting idea for vacant big box spaces.

Civic Architects transformed a former locomotive shed in Tilburg, the Netherlands, into an inspiring public library and a flexible, multi-purpose event space.

12/16/2018

An interesting article about the detrimental effects of dollar stores on communities, especially in the area of fresh food. But they’re often one of the few larger scale retailers to go into truly disadvantaged areas, sometimes arriving after the other options have already left.

They’re affordable, but often lack fresh and healthy food–and gut local and independently owned businesses.

11/01/2018

It’s great to go back to look at a city in its heyday.

If Google Street View existed in the Art Deco era, Hollywood Boulevard would have looked like this

10/20/2018

Here’s a lesson in granularity.

Want to do the kind of value-per-acre analysis that you’ve seen on Strong Towns before, but don’t think of yourself as a data wizard? Here’s a step by step guide for beginners.

09/02/2018

Another good Citylab article about transit. While prescriptive, it has a good history of transit in the US over the past 100 years, and a description of our current sorry state.

Streetcar, bus, and metro systems have been ignoring one lesson for 100 years: Service drives demand.

07/29/2018

There are lots of incredible textures in a city. Why not make art?

04/23/2018

Another James Fallows about the positive changes happening among negative trends in small town America.

Americans don’t realize how fast the country is moving toward becoming a better version of itself.

12/26/2017

This is a video about an alternative way of thinking about intersections, with no barriers and no signs. And it’s safer.

11/02/2017

There is nothing new or unusual about cities supporting the redevelopment of aging retail centers. Bloomberg reports on a couple of new projects.

At the Brookfield Square mall in Wisconsin, the landlord, CBL & Associates Properties Inc., needed a new occupant for a fading Sears. CBL had been tinkering with the mix for the past few years. Earlier, in 2008, it completed a 20,000-square-foot expansion, adding grocery stores and restaurants and r...