What will the city of 2050 look like? How will we really get there? A lot of urbanists seem to be buzzing about this, including the Urban Land Institute, which last year released a publication called The City in 2050. Many of the projections and visions, including those of ULI, are thought-provoking, evoking high-tech, connected cities with a reduced carbon footprint. Demographers add their two cents, with projections of an aging and more diverse population, and the corresponding effect on housing demand. One projection urbanists like to hang their hat on is by A.C. Nelson, who indicates that the United…

My latest Urban Land magazine article, entitled Light Rail in Charlotte, was published in the July 2009 issue. Read Light Rail in Charlotte here. You can also refer back to an earlier post on this website about my experience and observations in Charlotte while researching this article, entitled Riding the New Rails in Charlotte.

Well, you know, we all want to change the world. All apologies to the Beatles, but a revolution is indeed fomenting, and is captured very well in Pedaling Revolution, an excellent new book by Jeff Mapes. Mapes, perhaps unsurprisingly, lives in Portland, Oregon, a leading cycling town in America. His book takes us through efforts to increase awareness and safety of bicycling. Along the way, we navigate the cycling capitol of Amsterdam, as well as long-time American cycling cities like Davis, California. We also learn of efforts to increase biking in New York City, Chicago and Madison. Mapes mixes policy…

I recently returned to Madison, Wisconsin to write about Middleton Hills, a new urbanism development located just outside the city in Middleton. This was a homecoming of sorts for me, since I went to college in Madison, and remember Middleton Hills when it was but a glimmer in the developer’s eye. It all goes back to the fall of 1993. I was a freshman at UW-Madison, hadn’t declared a major, and took a landscape architecture course on somewhat of a lark. Phil Lewis was a guest lecturer for that course, and I was fascinated by him, as he seemed to…