Tim Halbur

What would you do if you could start a city from scratch? Claude Lewenz has dedicated his life to creating the perfect blueprint for a "VillageTown", combining the correct scale to create communities that care with a scale that makes economic sense for a fulfilling life. Managing Editor Tim Halbur talks with Lewenz about his vision (part 1 of 2).

Planetizen is pleased to release its tenth annual list of the ten best books of the year in urban planning, design and development. This year's assortment ranges from an crowdsourced compendium of ideas for upgrading New York City's built environment to a personal report from the streets of Karachi.

Look out, planners. Landscape architects are out to eat your lunch. Managing Editor Tim Halbur reports from the 2011 ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo in San Diego, where a movement towards better urbanism is hoping to balance a history of design-driven practice.

The results of our crowdsourcing project, in collaboration with the Project for Public Spaces, reveal not an objective Top 100 but instead a handful of communities passionate about their own local public spaces.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been asking you to help us crowdsource the Top 100 Public Spaces in the U.S. and Canada, in collaboration with Project for Public Spaces. For a different perspective, we asked some top architecture critics and practitioners to give us their favorites.

Planetizen and Project for Public Spaces want you to help us determine the best public spaces in the United States and Canada. Add your favorites to our list, and vote for other submissions to move them up in the rankings. The results will be published on October 20th, 2011.

Are skyscrapers the way to achieve great density, or a form of retro-urbanism that should be retired? With a debate simmering in the planning world over the energy efficiency and urban necessity of tall towers, Planetizen's staff decided to determine the answer once and for all.

Carmageddon failed to live up to the hype, as Los Angelenos opted to leave their cars in the garage. As the hysteria fades, Planetizen's Tim Halbur asks: is there a real story here about good transportation planning?

At the 19th Congress for the New Urbanism, Planetizen's Tim Halbur finds a vibrant, active community of urban thinkers more interested in improving livability than in architectural principles.

Our annual list of the 10 best planning, design, and development websites represents some of the top online resources for news, information and research on the built environment.

What, as a society, do we share? Natural resources? Internet access? Public space? Jay Walljasper and the nonprofit On the Commons cross political boundaries to advocate for the common good and all that we share.

Over the course of the year, the editors of Planetizen review and post summaries of hundreds of articles, reports, books, studies, and editorials related to planning and urban development. Here are our picks for the most fascinating, pervasive and popular planning trends of 2010.

Planetizen is pleased to release its ninth annual list of the ten best books in urban planning, design and development published in 2010. This year's selection includes some big names, some big ideas -- and a book called "Toilet."

Planetizen talks with Peter J. Park, Manager of Community Planning and Development for the City of Denver, Colorado, about the return of physical planning, the city's form-based code, and more.

Proposals for new projects arrive on city desks everyday showing vibrant public plazas full of people. But too often those spaces fail to attract people in the way they were portrayed. Are Photoshopped people a deliberate falsehood?

Whitehouse.gov held a live online event on July 15th at 2pm EDT/11am PDT on sustainable communities. All of the questions were submitted and chosen by Planetizen readers. An archive of the event can be viewed here.

Do parks succeed in making people more active? What works and what doesn't when designing and maintaining a park? A recent study by Active Living Research pulls together all the available research. Tim Halbur talks with the man behind the study, Andrew J. Mowen.

The plot of the summer blockbuster Iron Man 2 revolves around a fictional 1974 Expo, with the slogan "Better Living Through Technology." Managing Editor Tim Halbur says the film reflects the misplaced faith in technology and innovation that still drives Americans optimism.

Architect and urban innovator Andrés Duany has a new bone of contention: the usurping of the planning process by the public during the approval stage for new projects. Managing Editor Tim Halbur reports from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Planners at the Town of Cary, North Carolina were tasked by the mayor to make their complex planning process more accessible. In January, they launched a new website that allows developers to play out scenarios on their parcel to see what could work there. Planetizen interviews the people who made it a reality.