Ben Brown
Smart Design = Smart Policy? Not So Fast
After a few decades watching—and sometimes helping—great ideas die of overexposure to reality, I'm convinced it's not enough to just listen to folks you're hoping to help. You have to make something happen. A well-conceived charrette helps.
Filling in the 'Missing Middle': No New Wheels, Please
A new crop of developers are delivering fine-grained urbanism. Ben Brown checks into their boot camp and provides an update on the movement.
Thinking a Little Bigger About the Tiny House Thing
Can the tiny house fetish evolve to address real sustainability and affordable housing challenges? Ben Brown says yes.
Fix Housing Supply, Save the City: Is it Really That Easy?
Planning wonks might have felt all warm inside when they noticed zoning topics wedging their way into broader conversations about community affordability and equity. Bring it on. Finally.
The Unkickable Can: Toward a 'Livability Synthesis'
Ben Brown points out the potential political upside to the aging population.
The Katrina Cottage Legacy
The New Urbanist Katrina Cottages initiative for the Gulf Coast appeared to be a failure but their legacy lives on in the SmartDwellings and in the Tiny House movement.
Remember That Katrina Cottages Thing? Whatever Happened to That?
Katrina Cottages held such great promise 10 years ago, as an alternative to FEMA trailers. But a host of roadblocks stood in the way. After a decade, has the tiny house time arrived?
Katrina 'Ten Years After': and the Band Plays On
The 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is upon us. Many of us city planners invested whatever skills we thought we had, plus a heavy dose of passionate naivete, to recovery planning in the wake of the 2005 storm.
Pope Goes Global: Let's Talk Local
Pope Francis, sticking to his job description, is out to save the world and all its creatures. Maybe we can help in our own little universes, where we can influence planning and design that makes for swell places and for reduced contributions to GHG.
Ideas for Housing Opportunity: Some Sorta Oldish, Lots Very NUish
The latest in a list of tip-of-the-spear practitioners combining their own experience and expertise with the lessons of others who share similar commitments to the easy-to-grasp, hard-to-realize ideas driving new urbanism.
Need a Better Story? Get a Better To-Do List
If we can't grow our trust networks beyond our tribes, we can forget about working together successfully as communities and regions, let alone as a nation of citizens or in coalitions of nations in common causes.
'Gentrification' Redux: Wealth, Opportunity, Community
Ben Brown wades into the wealth/income inequity morass to make a pitch for getting beyond "gentrification" squabbles and on to wealth-building strategies for the bottom 90 percent.
Here's to the Winners of the Seaside Prize and to 'Attainable Housing'
Housing supply is offering up something that looks very different than what today's households want to buy.
Will Small Go Big in 2015? Maybe. Finally. Here's why.
Dwell small; live large. It's something many passionate urbanists have been working on for a decade. Could 2015 finally be the year small goes big?
Talkin' Right, Leanin' Left: The 'New Consurbanism'?
If we remove our ideological blinders, we might notice that the traditional city serves the interests of both the Left and the Right. Common ground, literally and figuratively. Ben Brown explores.
Urban vs. Suburban: The Debate Continues
However your read the tea leaves, if it's true the 'burbs are reinventing themselves in the new era, it’s walkable, compact urbanism that's providing a game plan.
Disappointment, Pessimism, Rage: Is this America at Middle Age?
Community conversations often devolve. Could it be partly due to the "midlife crisis" of the North American demographic? Can we look forward to a time of more social connectedness in the next decade, as we recalibrate to less "me," more "we?"
Irony and Inevitability: Stumbling Toward Accountable Public Policy
U.S. politics are "...beginning to sound like a mash-up of Greek tragedy and Groundhog Day. All hubris and irony, over and over again. But the pragmatism required in cities and states is starting to look like an exit strategy."
Going Viral, but Not in a Good Way
Republicans and Democrats have connected failures to control spread of Ebola to the other guys’ actions. We’re requiring stressed-out bureaucracies to perform out-of-the-box with zero tolerance in arenas of mind-boggling complexity.
Euro-Envy Reconsidered: Talkin' Time, Distance, and Change
Most North American urbanists turn to Europe for inspiration and direction. Some of that brilliance, Ben Brown reminds us, is due to time and distance.
City of Costa Mesa
Licking County
Barrett Planning Group LLC
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Mpact Transit + Community
HUD's Office of Policy Development and Research
Tufts University, Department of Urban and Environmental Policy & Planning
City of Universal City TX
ULI Northwest Arkansas
Urban Design for Planners 1: Software Tools
This six-course series explores essential urban design concepts using open source software and equips planners with the tools they need to participate fully in the urban design process.
Planning for Universal Design
Learn the tools for implementing Universal Design in planning regulations.
