Placemaking

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]

angels in LA

Not all angels have wings. Some are clearly grounded and quietly working in Los Angeles city parks thanks to the partnership between the Recreation and Parks Department and the Los Angeles Parks Foundation.[read more]

skate parks

Nowadays, skateparks seem to be the new form of the traditional town squares we all remember visiting during our childhood and adolescence years.[read more]

Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele, Milan

The developmental link between Expo 2015 and Westfield Milano, as well as a physical rail link between Linate and these sites, suggests this is a strong opportunity to build a mall for the next generation.[read more]

art meets infrastructure?

As a part of a midtown place-making project, the Coeur d’Alene Arts Commission sent out a Call to Artists for four free-standing sculptures that could be used as public bike racks.[read more]

urbanism without effort?

While we might champion the programmed successes of certain iconic examples, we risk ignoring the backstory of urban forms and functions, and failing to truly understand the traditional relationships between people and place.[read more]

Indianapolis' cultural trail

The Indianapolis Cultural Trail is a significant project in and of itself, but it gains even more significance when considered in the larger scope of the transformation taking place in this Midwestern state capital.[read more]

a sense of place

Places of appealing character and distinctiveness draw us to them and away from sprawl; as they do, they become more sustainable, in a quite literal sense.[read more]