Last week I had the good fortune to travel to Washington D.C. to attend the Blueprint for American Prosperity, an event by the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. The Blueprint was the culmination of significant research and several publications on how our metro areas are the economic engines of the American economy. The timing of the event, or “Summit,” as it was called, was to advance an urban agenda for this year’s presidential election and the new congress and president in 2009. The core argument is our 100 largest metropolitan areas (cities and surrounding suburbs) contain 65 percent of our…

A recent tour of several public housing redevelopments in the city of Milwaukee opened my eyes to several lessons in good design, development and planning. The city of Milwaukee Department of City Development has made great strides in the past decade in terms of infill, good urban design and inner city redevelopment. I was in Milwaukee mainly to focus on the Highland Gardens and Highland Homes project, a redevelopment of two aging and, in typical fashion of 1960s public housing, quite dreadful towers and rowhomes in to a new urbanism neighborhood of single-family homes and elderly/disabled public housing. A case…

It has been nearly one year since the 35W bridge collapse in my beloved Minneapolis, and in that time three major bridges across the Mississippi throughout Minnesota have been closed due to safety concerns. Luckily, those three bridge projects have been fast-tracked, and our state legislature has also bravely approved a gas and sales tax increase to put towards both maintenance of existing as well as new projects. On a related note, a recent publication by the Urban Land Institute titled Infrastructure 2008 makes a compelling case that the United States needs to get its act together and improve its…

In May the Urban Land Institute published Creating Great Town Centers and Urban Villages. The book is a coffeetable-style journey through many of America’s recent suburban town centers. To browse the book, visit the ULI Bookstore here. I am happy to say that I contributed two of the case studies that appear in the book. One is The Glen, in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, and the other is Crocker Park in Westlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. Suburbs need town centers. They need places for people to gather, linger, live, work, and of course shop and dine. Ideally…

Check out a recent article of mine in the April issue of Urban Land, entitled Getting Around in the Heart of Texas. It discusses tollways, transit-oriented development, bridges, and even logistics hubs. There is a lot going on in the Dallas/Fort Worth area with regard to transportation. I hope you find it interesting. In the course of researching this article, I stopped at Las Colinas in Irving, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Las Colinas was started in the 1980s as a master planned mixed use area with office, hotels and residential. It is built on a lake and canal system,…