Coming to you live from Utrect, a beautiful college city about a half-hour train ride southeast of Amsterdam. My hotel is located one narrow alley away from a winding canal lined with cobblestone streets and charming old buildings. Coming home last night after a long day tromping around seeing Dutch urbanity, it was positively wonderful to take a midnight walk along the canal. If you’ve never been to Utrecht, I recommend it right now. We spent the day yesterday on a guided tour of Almere, a suburb of Amsterdam with 175,000 people. The amazing thing to consider is present day…

Recently, while writing an article about parks conservancies, I had the pleasure of visiting the park systems in Pittsburgh and Louisville, and Prospect Park in Brooklyn to see for myself what can be achieved by augmenting public funding for parks with private dollars. Parks conservancies not only help preserve historic park designs by legendary landscape architects, but also modernize parks for today’s needs, which is particularly improtant in our urban areas. Click here to read my article as it appears in the May 2007 issue of Urban Land magazine. Parks Conservancies

Two of my Minneapolis colleagues, Tom Menke and Nate Smith, run a development firm called The Urban Project www.theurbanproject.com. I know them through the Urban Land Institute’s Young Leaders Group, for those of us that are under age 35. They just opened their first new development model, a four-unit rowhome project in Minneapolis called E2 Homes. Built on a mitigated site, E2 Homes focuses on green development. The genius of their marketing is a simple diagram – part marketing, part education – that shows a cross-section of a typical unit and all the green features incorporated. See the diagram here…

Under the leadership of Mayor Daley, Chicago is a leader in green development. Read my recent article in Urban Land magazine here – Green Chicago