Placemaking

placemaking

The biennial award celebrates “urban places distinguished by quality design and contributions to the social, economic, and communal vitality of our nation’s cities.”[read more]

crew on the Anacostia

The Anacostia routinely makes the bad lists of the nation’s most endangered and polluted rivers. Yet a weekday cruise on this urban river reminds us of what’s worth making an effort to restore.[read more]

Women's Building, San Francisco

A diverse crowd of people and restaurants offer different kinds of cuisines and have catalyzed this area as a cultural incubator. The ease with which people interact has increased the use of public space much more powerfully than in a suburb.[read more]

Pike Place Market

In a time where you can buy almost anything online, Seattle’s Pike Place Market reminds us that character and convenience are not synonymous. It is a place that connects the public to the city’s history.[read more]

creativity in Phoenix

Andy Brown moved back to Phoenix to cut his cost of living so that he can concentrate on making art rather than figuring out how to sell it – and found that the selling of it is starting to take care of itself, through word of mouth.[read more]

people and cities

Initiatives like these are fine examples of how friendly interactions in urban spaces, however simple they may be, can be very beneficial in making the experience of living in a city more inviting and welcoming.[read more]

post-Kantamanto Market fire

Now would be a perfect opportunity to develop a design solution that formally integrates market vendors’ and their activities into the overall economy; to work with those trading at markets like Kantamanto, rather than working against them.[read more]

transit-oriented development

Oakland continues to bring new development and innovation to its neighborhoods. Next up is an impressive urban planning initiative to be built in Temescal beside the MacArthur BART station.[read more]

revitalizing communities

The 21st century promises to be much kinder to cities and older neighborhoods than the second half of the 20th and, as neighborhoods recover, one of the more engaging trends is the role of community-based arts in revitalization.[read more]

Josh O'Conner is a Senior Editor for the Urban Times an online magazine. He's a planner by trade and an advocate for community-oriented urbanism. When he's off the clock, Josh STILL likes urban planning. But he also fills his time with small-scale agriculture, ecology, and sociology. He does all that with his wife and daughters in...[read more]

get the children outside!

If children are the future, we seem to be very short-sighted when it comes to urban design. Very little, if any at all, of the current discourse on the type of cities we should be building truly considers whether these cities will be child friendly.[read more]

cultural creativity in Berlin

Artists and bohemians have been flocking to Berlin since the wall came down in 1989. Affordable rents and vacant spaces allowed room for experimentation, as diversity in numbers created a dynamic infrastructure.[read more]