By Janet L. Smith   Chicago’s public housing is testimony to a long history of struggle between poor people and politicians. The latest contest is over the Chicago Housing Authority’s (CHA) Plan for Transformation, which aims to reduce the existing unit count from 38,000 to 25,000. Fifty-one buildings–most of them high-rise–are slated for demolition. Some […]

By Jennifer Hurley I became interested in planning because I wanted to fight poverty, and I saw that poverty and the physical environment were tied together. I was also concerned with protecting the natural environment and preserving quality architecture. I wanted to understand how to make human-scaled, walkable environments and how to prevent the development […]

By Jill Grant New urbanist-inspired approaches to suburban development are common in contemporary Canada. Suburbs influenced by new urbanism and featuring modified grid layouts, narrow streets, small lots and limited street setbacks are increasingly common. “Traditional” houses with front porches and pitched roofs are proliferating across the landscape. The new urbanist model has promoted new […]

By Michael Pyatok New urbanism has been aggressively marketed within the last decade by “boomers” who came of age professionally in the 1990s, disenchanted with the negative physical and social consequences of the sprawl and urban renewal they had witnessed as young professionals educated in the 1960s. Much credit should be bestowed upon them for […]