Community / Economic Development

The arts district in downtown Los Angeles is transforming its industrial buildings into trendy boutiques, restaurants and hotels. The concern is that gentrification will drive out low-paid artists who can no longer afford to live there.

January 23, 2013 - The Los Angeles Times

From education to housing to health, Chicago's Gary Comer, billionaire founder of Lands' End, invested millions into the struggling South Side neighborhood of Pocket Town in a mission to transform it into a beacon of hope for the community.

January 23, 2013 - Chicago Magazine

The old cool: Sealing yourself inside suburban air conditioning. The new cool? According to Howard Blackson, it's the joy to be found outside, connecting with one another and the world we share.

January 22, 2013 - PlaceShakers

Philadelphia spends $64 on parks and recreation facilities per resident, one of the lowest totals in the nation. Ryan Briggs uses the city as a lens to examine the growing impact of budget cuts to park systems on their surrounding communities.

January 22, 2013 - Next City

One of the cities that's led the growing trend in urban freeway removal is considering another tear down, report Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross.

January 21, 2013 - San Francisco Chronicle

Rachel L. Swarns traces D.C.'s transformation into a younger and livelier city to when a former senator from Illinois moved into a stately mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue, and brought with him urbane tastes and an iPod filled with Nicki Minaj.

January 21, 2013 - The New York Times

"America is renewing itself from the bottom up." That is the premise underlying the second annual “Innovations to Watch” list just released by The Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program and The Rockefeller Foundation.

January 20, 2013 - Brookings

In this compelling essay, authors Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava take a look at Tokyo's post-war development and explore how lessons learned from its unplanned growth may be useful for other rapidly urbanizing Asian cities today.

January 20, 2013 - Next City

Renting out luxury homes has become an attractive choice in today's housing market. High-end renters get many of the benefits of owning a home, with greater built-in flexibility, and without the financial risk.

January 19, 2013 - The Wall Street Journal

The decade-long transformation of Toronto's historic Maple Leaf Gardens into a new centerpiece for its neighborhood may serve as a model for one of the trickiest types of adaptive reuse, reports Mark Byrnes.

January 18, 2013 - The Atlantic Cities

Neal Peirce looks at how Philadelphia has used light to help transform the image, and fortunes, of Center City.

January 18, 2013 - Citiwire

Declining populations and economic malaise in many European countries are just some of the forces contributing to what most agree seems like a lasting decline in the continent's demand for automobiles.

January 18, 2013 - The Wall Street Journal

Are we growing more connected, yet further and further apart? And how does this bode for the resilience of the communities we share? Scott Doyon finds promise as of yet unfulfilled.

January 18, 2013 - PlaceShakers

What do three-pack-a-day smoking habits, triple-decker cheese burgers and sprawl have in common? They all offer immediate gratification and deferred consequences. But now the bill's coming due. Ben Brown lays out some ways to face the music.

January 17, 2013 - PlaceShakers

Employing material gathered for his forthcoming book, Chuck Wolfe argues for layered, historical illustrations of how people relate to built and sociocultural communities around them, and offers 5 principles and companion lessons for placemaking.

January 16, 2013 - myurbanist

Over the next few decades, half of global economic growth is predicted to come from the slums of developing world cities. Gaia Vince believes the key to the coming urban revolution is how these shantytowns evolve.

January 16, 2013 - BBC

Lafayette Park is a thriving and diverse neighborhood of high rises and townhouses designed by Mies van der Rohe. This unique modern architecture success story in Detroit is showcased in a new book "Thanks for the View, Mr. Mies."

January 16, 2013 - Fast Company Co.Design

The "great global project" of this century, says Patrick Doherty, is how to "accommodate 3 billion additional middle-class aspirants in two short decades." In a bold essay, he outlines how the U.S. must lead the global transition to sustainability.

January 15, 2013 - Foreign Policy

Kaid Benfield examines a model 'pocket neighborhood' - Little Rock's Pettaway - which simultaneously improves a declining neighborhood, provides affordable infill housing and applies advanced measures for stormwater control.

January 15, 2013 - NRDC Switchboard

Town Branch Creek was once the lifeblood of Lexington, Kentucky. Now, more than a century after it was rerouted and buried, city leaders want to resurrect the historic waterway as the focal point of downtown redevelopment.

January 15, 2013 - The Architect's Newspaper