If Walmart builds its Midtown Miami location as it is designed today, the potential for pedestrian injury could be high. The plan is riddled with design flaws and areas that don't meet zoning code.
When you think about it, a window has a complicated job: it must allow the sun's light to pass though, but not the sun's heat. It must keep cool conditioned air inside, but not have condensation on the outside of the glass.
You should not rely on a certificate as the sole indicator of how green your community is -- rely more on your "on-the-ground" analysis. Here are some things to look for.
One of the more interesting and exciting aspects of the "new urbanism" movement is that the next paradigm could well be much more than the return to the close-knit community of small villages and towns.
What the New Urbanists take from Jane Jacobs is what nearly every other planner or urbanist working today takes from Jacobs regardless in what context they work: a set of pro-urban values. Love of the city.
Today's efforts to recreate elements of the city, of whatever prescription of urbanism (e.g., "new," "landscape" or "ecological"), often turn on issues once considered in design competitions long forgotten.
Generally speaking, the description of any Utopia that involves many details is apt to be an unconvincing way to present a principle which can be appl...
Hilltop centers can serve as the partially self-contained models for the compact and dense urban neighborhoods which are increasingly the vanguard of new century urbanism.
The Language of Towns and Cities is an oddly personal work. I say "oddly," because the book's title invokes that most characteristically objective of all books, the dictionary.
Calls to be greener and use less energy ultimately mean nothing unless we can fundamentally restructure the suburban environment. The real problem with suburbia, after all, is spatial.
Landscape Urbanism sees landscape architecture, rather than architecture, as the design medium more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.
Rosemary Beach is one of 14 experimental communities along the 26 miles of Florida's South Walton Beach and unlike most American towns, Rosemary Beach doesn't allow front yards.
In cities, agriculture might be able to take the place of vacant lots. And in suburbia? Well, in 2008, the New Urbanism evangelist Andrés Duany, of D...
Cities cover only 3% of the world's land mass, but they house 50% of the world's population, consume 75% of the world's resources and emit a correspon...
The discussion was mostly polite and the issues complex as 70 people crowded into a downtown Library room to hear four experts discuss Boulder's planned Transit Village redevelopment plan.
If The Smart Growth Manual used images that were more urban, it would have an easier time facilitating a dialogue between the warring camps of urbanists.
Bad schools and even the perception of disorder drive people from the city more effectively than bad urban form, and keeping people in the city is more important than the form the city takes.
Because the rebuilding of cities is so important, the effort to do so, if that effort is based on recognizable principles, deserves recognition as something special.
I wrote about three places where I have seen Cityism occurring -- Vancouver, Barcelona, and my own city of Santa Monica -- but there are many other cities where Cityism is taking place.
The developments in these three cities are based on maximizing and capturing the economic value of city real estate. They all represent intensification of uses.