Easily the year’s most inspiring read for urbanists is “The Great Neighborhood Book – A Do-it-Yourself Guide to Placemaking,” by Jay Walljasper. A fellow Minneapolitan, Mr. Walljasper has been active for years finding ways to improve his neighborhood. This book, a Project for Public Spaces (www.pps.org) publication, provides a broad and effective array of ideas to improve cities. The Great Neighborhood Book is divided in to chapters such as Pride in Your Place and Greening the Neighborhood, but is effectively a series of one- and two-page case studies. It includes everything from a simple potluck with neighbors to turning entire…

Our family took a weeklong vacation to Boston recently, and here are just a few of the highlights of that wonderful city. Flower planters in Beacon Hill. Wandering through the narrow streets of Beacon Hill, I noticed that rowhomes often have flower planters hanging on their ground floor window sills, which happen to be at eye level for most people. This is a welcome splash of color in an already beautiful urban setting. Flowers Brighten the City Beacon Hill Street Scene The Myrtle Street Play Area. Also in Beacon Hill, Ellis and I were headed back to our hotel from…

With all the recent momentum to move “back to the city,” it is well known that those moving back to the urban core are not traditional nuclear families. In fact, they are anything but. Check any gentrifying urban area and you find everyone from young singles and couples to aging baby boomers, but very few children. This presents a conundrum when young singles and couples who want to remain in the city are faced with child rearing and the question “should I stay or should I go?” CEOs for Cities, a Chicago-based non-profit that brings together urban leaders to seek…

One quote that stands out from my trip to the Netherlands is “urbanism is dominant of architecture.” I don’t remember who said it exactly, but I remember when and where. Our group was having wine and discussion after dinner one night, eleven stories above Amsterdam in the old post office building that is being renovated and now has a restaurant and club on the top floor. It may have been the wine or the lovely view, but we were having a “lofty” conversation about planning and design, and one of the professionals from Amsterdam made that statement, which in many…

Spending a week touring The Netherlands by train and bicycle sounded good to me. On my one previous trip to Amsterdam, I had borrowed a friend’s bicycle to get around, including sightseeing as well as mundane tasks like cycling to business meetings. While roaming the streets that flank the canals is a wonderful thing, I was struck by the sheer bicycle usage and the infrastructure dedicated to it. It seemed to me at the time that the Dutch were pretty good urbanists, and any chance to explore how they design their buildings and cities was one I was not going…

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

I have long been a supporter of transit investment. I have lived in London, a wonderful city with a great transit system, and I understand how wonderful it can be to meet all my needs without a car. I also find it appalling that my Minnesota has been so loathe to build a bigger and better transit system. Transit investment is also good for the environment. Transit is one of the reasons New York City has the lowest per capita energy usage of any U.S. city. I’m living proof. In the month after purchasing a house near the only light…