ULI just published an article I wrote about the future of office space. On a recent assignment, I came across an intriguing quote that the amount of office space required per employee will essentially shrink to one-quarter of today’s level. In other words, companies won’t need as much space as employees increasingly are able to work from home or anywhere. Wow, I thought, that would be devastating for the office market. Read the article at ULI here. I personally feel there is some merit to all of this, that the office market is at an inflection point as a result,…

What is the best way to experience and be a part of your surroundings? In city or countryside, this urbanist knows being on foot is tough to beat, but a recent trip to the Boundary Waters (BWCAW) caused me to reconsider. A canoe is hard to beat as the best way to experience wilderness lakes in northern Minnesota. Could a bicycle be the best way to experience the city? Perhaps the canoe and bicycle are kindered spirits. In his 1956 collection of essays about the Boundary Waters entitled “The Singing Wilderness,” author Sigurd Olson describes “The Way of a Canoe”…

In May I caught some flak for a post on my website that discussed the merits of a broken traffic light and how it made crossing a major intersection on foot more palatable. Let’s just say not everybody was amused, particularly those stuck in traffic as pedestrians got to cross the street. Needless to say, the traffic light was fixed, and the silver lining in this story is the improved Walk signals since that time. The intersection in question is 38th Street and Hiawatha Avenue (State Highway 55). This is a treeless, ugly expanse of awfulness where two streets meet…

Story: a guy gets up in front of a crowded public meeting about a proposed project and says “I have two questions. Is this a done deal and will I get assesssed for it?” Upon hearing the answer to the first question is “yes” and the second is “no,” he says thank you and promptly walks out of the room. That is one of the easiest dealings with a NIMBY I’ve ever heard. I wish all public meetings would go this way. Unfortunately, NIMBYs continue to be “mad as hell,” as Scott Doyon discussed in a recent post about NIMBYs…

I just saw Charles Landry speak. Mr. Landry is a worldly urban thinker, and I found his presentation very enlightening. One of the many pithy quotes he recited was “if your plan starts with parking, your vision may not be good enough.” So to butcher an old expression, I must say I concur. Too often, we can’t see the forest for the trees in urban development. We do start with the parking (trees), addressing design and context (forest) secondly. I was just in a charrette where the discussion immediately went to parking. How much parking we could get under the…

A number of things bothered me about a recent article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune . The article discusses how suburban municipalities in the Twin Cities are being forced by multiple forces affecting the real estate market to scale back “utopian” dreams of large-scale mixed-use developments and accept single-use projects, often driven by large corporations. The article didn’t really address two important things: 1) Much has changed in terms of demand for real estate development, particularly housing, and 2) mixed-use urban developments are difficult to fully achieve in a suburban setting. The article made me think about the large mixed-use…