Happy birthday to one of the greatest artists in new urbanism, Architect Dhiru Thadani.

America needs more cottage courts

High schoolers should learn to speak this kind of American 👇🏻

May's events! Join us this afternoon (Tuesday, May 4th) at 4 pm EST for Happy Hour with our columnists! We'll be discussing columnist Nick Larkins's recent article "City on a Hill: A Critique of Commodified Communities and a Plea for Real Ownership." You can find the livestream at southernurbanism.org

On the surface, the Fenton development in #Cary, NC looks like it has all the things an #urbanist would want. It's mixed-use, fairly #walkable, and has a town square. Yet Southern Urbanism Columnist Nick Larkins argues that it's missing something that makes it feel fundamentally strange and impersonal: #OWNERSHIP. Read the whole post today at 🔗👉bio #development #finance #placemaking

Great #cities require great young leadership. The young talent associated with the #CNU are members of the "Emerging New #Urbanists", which is now led by Sophie McAdara, a planner and amazing watercolor artist from Northwest #Arkansas. If you are young and care about cities, join the ENU today. loom.ly/H1UIifY

We'll take the former.

Watch this important interview from our former columnist @AustinTunnell of @Build_Culture:

Absolutely brutal.

By definition, a Church should be a community, a place where believers come together to worship and serve each other in service and prayer. But for so many churches, the idea of community exists for the two hours between when people leave their car in the parking lot, and when they skip out after communion to beat traffic on the way out of the parking lot. How we build churches has a lot to do with this, since we build churches far away from neighborhoods, looking for huge lots where we can surround them with seas of parking lots. But what would happen if we started looking at church properties as a place to build a REAL community rather than just a place for ample parking? What if instead of making church a part-time activity on Sunday, we started making parishes into a place to live out the faith every single day of the week? This is the idea behind the vision for the New Parish Village Plan. This proposal shows how a suburban parish can be transformed into a living and breathing community where parishioners could live within walking distance of each other and start to create a real parish community. Drawing from examples of small villages in Europe and the Eastern United States, the plan centers the church standing at its heart. Surrounded by a variety of housing types, from large houses to small apartments, every member of the parish could find a home nearby, and with public space to gather and a small retail center for a café, coffee shop, or office space, the parish could be alive every day of the week, not just Sunday.

In 1999, Austin, TX, closed Robert Mueller Municipal Airport, the original city-owned airport, built 1928-30, and turned the site into a nice masterplanned New Urbanist suburb. Grid. Medium density. Tree-lined boulevards. On-site amenities. Classic vernacular architecture.

Atlanta's housing growth dropped from 4.8%/yr in the '70s to 0.6% today—same across the Sunbelt. Why? Consensus view blames regulation. But look at this map: housing drops >45 min drive. It's not regulation: they've run out of commutable land. New build is now urban infill.

The Urban Guild believes the next generation of designers is essential to advancing better places and stronger communities. Each year they celebrate student work at the Guild Summit—and now are making it easier for students to get involved with student memberships for $60/year ($5/month) for those looking to grow their careers while still in school. Click here to learn more sign up loom.ly/AMC7R2I

"The fight for more socially vibrant cities won’t end with a zoning rewrite. At the end of the day, that’s not all we are fighting for. We are fighting for a culture that prioritizes equity, accessibility, safety, and even beauty." Read Billy Cooney's article today

When you Google small towns in New England, the pictures that pop up almost always have steeples in them. The same is not true in the South. Why is that? Why have religious buildings become symbols of their towns? Read the answer at the link in our bio.