Island Press Field Notes

Harold Henderson of Build a Better Burb interviewed author Ned Crankshaw, author of Creating Vibrant Public Spaces: Streetscape Design in Commercial and Historic Districts. He chairs the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Kentucky.

Reid Ewing, author of the forthcoming book, Measuring Urban Design, talks to Angie Schmitt of Streetsblog. Here’s another obscure but significant obstacle to building walkable places in America: the Institute of Transportation Engineers’ shoddy traffic generation models for mixed-use development.

As urban stakeholders -- residents, pundits, developers, associated professionals, and politicians -- we like to discuss and debate aspects of urbanism and how cities should change to meet new challenges. But when we talk about urbanism, I think we often forget the underlying dynamics that are as old as cities themselves. As a result, we favor fads over the indigenous underpinnings of urban settlement and personal observation of urban change.

Charles R. Wolfe's new E-ssential tackles the idea that to create vibrant, sustainable urban areas for the long term, we must first understand “what happens naturally when people congregate in cities—-innate, unprompted interactions of urban dwellers with each other and their surrounding urban and physical environment.” In this piece in the Atlantic Cities, he expands on that premise: