North America

Scholar and Brookings Fellow Christopher B. Leinberger says Vancouver provides an accessible model for American cities as they look for examples of sustainable development done right.

As the housing industry flounders, New Urbanist developers are using the flexibility inherent in their community plans to their advantage.

Neighborhoods -- their habits, their participants, and their values -- are what create and define value in a city and in a home. Cities need to embrace this fact if they want to preserve values and retain residents.

The German city of Bremen has lessons to teach North American cities about sustainable transportation, according to this article from The Toronto Star.

National Trust Main Street Center Program Officer Nick Kalogersis, AICP gives a primer on form-based zoning and its relavance to traditional commercial district revitalization.

Ruben Anderson suggests that if automobile parking could be kept to properties, that could free up the former on-street parking to become Garden Streets, so that cities could grow much more of their own produce.

In this article from Metropolis, dystopian author and urban critic James Howard Kunstler riffs on localism.

This report from Metro Magazine outlines 25 North American cities currently planning bus rapid transit lines.

New research suggests that urban sprawl doesn't cause weight gain in residents, though it does attract people who are inclined to be heavy and prefer to move around by car.

Thomas Wüst’s semiotic work on urbanity reviews literary contributions on the topic of urbanity, coming to the harsh conclusion that urbanity is, after all, nothing but a myth, and therefore likely to be instrumentalized by "symbolic politics".

If 'peak oil' makes oil-intensive industrial agriculture economically unfeasible, will suburbanites need to turn their lawns into farming plots?

This paper shows how urban development may be considered in terms of musical categories, and associates spontaneous and informal urban actions with their analog in musical discourse: improvisation.

A new approach to urbanism in suburban Atlanta, the Tributary community is based on a mixed-use master plan integrating and interconnecting a range of residential neighborhoods, a village center, a town center, and more.

Richard Florida's latest research shows that vibrant music "scenes" -- or a city's "audio identity" -- are good indicators of urban vitality.

Once thriving, America's indoor shopping malls are on the decline, and many predict their death may finally come within the next few years.

This article from Time discusses the burden development places on the environment and how New Urbanism seeks to mitigate this burden.

From smaller residential projects to vast mixed-use developments, more and more architects are crossing over into development work, bringing a fresh perspective to the process.

As foreclosure rates rise across the country, former homeowners are seeking shelter in suburban "tent cities" while municipalities struggle to cope with extra costs and declining tax revenues.

Plans for a North American Superhighway will have major environmental effects, argues this article from The Valley Advocate of Connecticut.

In an interview with Preservation Online, author Anne Matthews explains the growing movement to preserve historic sounds.