News that mining of lithium comes up short to solve the climate crisis highlights a need for walkability and micromobility Governments and car manufacturers are touting electric vehicles (EVs) as the wonder antidote to climate change. EVs will need abundant mined lithium, a key component of EV batteries. A recent report by the Climate and Community Project at the University of California, Davis, Achieving Zero Emissions with More Mobility and Less Mining, calls into question

Neighborhood electric vehicles offer a better local transportation option in light of climate threats, but the design of streets would need to change. Half of the work of urban design is deciding where to store cars. It’s a common lament of urban design professionals. In my community, controversy is brewing because Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) and housing advocates want to build housing on a BART station’s surface parking lots. As usual NIMBYs are protesting, but other more

An inspiring and free online book imagining a low-carbon future for America's towns and cities In a hoped-for future our collective carbon footprint from climate change will be much lower than it is today. But what will our towns and cities that produce that result look like? I’m pleased to announce the launch of a book that gives us a visual glimpse into that low-carbon future. Imagining a Walkable America is a free online book containing a selection of photo-simulations I’v

Written with Mike Huston. Someday we may look back and wonder how we ever put up with breathing exhaust-filled air in our city streets.

Sprawl may surge for a time if we ignore the fundamental needs of human habitat. Commentators in the newspapers and social media are predicting Americans will return to auto-oriented suburbia after the frightening experience of the COVID-19 pandemic—that low density suburbs will increase in popularity by offering a sanitary separation from other people that denser, walkable communities don’t. But this perfectly logical deduction ignores the complexity of our animal motivation

The growing popularity of e-bikes will fuel greater demand for better bicycling infrastructure. People will only get more frustrated that au

It’s About More than Friends and Families Articles in the popular press have suggested that there’s an epidemic of loneliness, that Americans have fewer and fewer meaningful connections to other people. Studies show that unrelieved loneliness has physiological effects leading to higher rates of morbidity and mortality, especially in older adults, and may be fueling the opioid crisis and upticks in suicide rates. Yet loneliness is an imperfect indicator that something is socia

Urban Advantage images have evolved over the years, but the web site lagged. I've been creating photo-simulations of positive urban...

Can urban places make us healthier? Most animals, if given the right environment, have no difficulty being active. That’s what animals are—they are animated life. But put them in the wrong environment, and their vitality will decline. Recent research from Dr. Julian Pittman of Troy University shows that a fish in a small glass bowl of water gets bored and depressed. Yes, depressed. It sinks to the bottom of the bowl and hardly moves. If antidepressants are put in the water, i

Development regulation is the new housing crisis culprit. Lately I’ve been reading articles that place the blame for America’s housing crisis at the feet of development regulation. The authors are not making the distinction that the rules are wrong. The claim is that if we just roll back regulation so that there is less of it, our housing crisis would lessen. It is true that zoning regulations have too often been used by local governments and anti-growth residents to freeze n

There are always good reasons for not doing the right thing. Years ago I served on the design review board (DRB) of my home town in the San Francisco Bay Area. On the board, I was the only soul who was not an architect. I got my degree in sociology. My only credential was that I thought my community should have more visible pedestrians and bicyclists. I called myself an urbanist, a word without much currency back then. The fact that I was an advocate for good urban form—whate

American zoning is a unique signature about our times. Form-based codes are a big improvement over conventional zoning, but that’s a hard argument to make if advocates have a poor understanding of zoning and its history. Zoning is one of the least understood undercurrents shaping our world and experience. As affordable housing is increasingly out of reach for many Americans and the planet heats up, zoning — a topic that for most people is arcane and sleep-inducing — is bubbli

A remarkable and growing body of literature is telling us that healthy communities need face-to-face interaction among their members, something that electronic media cannot replace. Physical places enable or prevent that interaction. Humans are social, yet this primary fact of life is oddly absent as a core consideration in modern urban development regulations. To ignore the social needs of our species is to lose sight of one of the most positive drivers for shaping sustainab

Zoning should knit communities together, not divide it. “Form-based codes aren’t cheap. If we keep the existing zoning map and add some building-form standards, we’d be almost there.” Some planning directors have had these hopeful thoughts when deciding whether to pursue a form-based code. The question acknowledges the need to make changes to zoning, but naively hopes for simple tweaks. Zoning that effectively shapes and strengthens communities requires more than this. If zon

Chattanooga sees shaping the form of its downtown as key to its future. Chattanooga’s form-based code is part of an innovative vision for the city’s economic, environmental and cultural future. Following a recent visit to Chattanooga, Bruce Katz wrote in a Brookings Institute blog, “Something special is happening in Chattanooga.” As Katz points out, too often venture capitalists “pay too little attention to small and mid-sized cities with strong innovative assets.” To remedy

The quality of fenestration on building facades is key to making public spaces social. How much of a building exterior is covered with openings, in particular windows and doors, how transparent the enclosing glass is, and how the openings are arranged are issues of fenestration. Not all form-based codes concern themselves with building fenestration. FBCs commonly regulate street width, block size, and buildings’ disposition on their lots and orientation to sidewalks—all issue