Why is it even important?

The words plaza, place and piazza have the same Greek origin, with plaza being the Spanish adaption, place in French, and piazza the Italian one. However, while these spaces retain their community-centric car-free heritage in each respective country, the U.S. chose the term ‘plaza’ to define its own urban public squares, which have since become auto-oriented models that have almost nothing to do with its Spanish origin. For instance, the New Urbanism Lexicon, the de

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As the 1600+ entries in this blog provide evidence for, emerging generations are moving into downtowns, driving less, walking more, living in smaller homes they can actually afford, preferring local businesses and slower food, prioritizing health,going green and valuing community and social networking like never before. It keeps coming up again and again, that the one amenity that does a remarkable job of fulfilling these values is the timeless piazza.

Based largely on the introduction in the

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No graph better explains the evolution of the economy and placemaking better than this one. Note how the emergence of the knowledge economy is resulting in the demand for places that share the same values with walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods, similar to the times before the industrial, mass production era.

Now, we all know the modern computer operating systems for workplace productivity lie in Linux, Mac OS and Windows, and increasingly in iOS and Android. So what’s the operating system

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If you’re passionate about walking, biking and living outside of the city, then you might want to check out what may be the very first new car-free community to break ground in the U.S. Modeled after remote pedestrian-only towns like Zermatt, Switzerland (see photo above and aerial of town here), it’s called Bicycle City, and its founders would like the initial development 15 miles south of Columbia, South Carolina to be the first of many.

It will be very similar to the Vauban neighborhood in

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If all continues to go well, San Francisco’s business and resident groups (ie the crowd) will be able to trade parking spaces for revenue and quality-of-life generating spaces instead. The City’s Pavement to Parks trial program is experimenting with repurposing underutilized street space into pedestrian-only parks and plazas. Their first project, the 17th Street Plaza has already become a favorite local destination.

The positive reception has lead to its ‘Parklet‘ program, where a pedestrian

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If you’re going to crowdsource places for creatives, it’s pretty clear you need to start with a core group of creatives. However, if you’re going to crowdsource the planning of urban districts for creatives, often sharing many of the same principles as the Smart Growth movement, it would be highly beneficial if everyone had a copy of the Smart Growth Manual as a reference.

Crowdsourcing a business or building is one thing, but planning urban development on a block or neighborhood level starts

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Geneva, Switzerland, central to United Nations relations (ie known as the ‘Peace Capital’, site of the Geneva Convention) ranked in a 2009 survey by Mercer as having the third-highest quality of life in the world, and referred to as the world’s most compact metropolis, which essentially means one of the most pedestrian-oriented. It is also extremely diverse because of its international affairs.

Geneva’s most pedestrian-oriented area by far, not surprisingly, is its historic district, known as

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It’s a fairly common phenomenon, when things are bad, people seek camaraderie. When things become difficult across an entire city or economy, people seek a sense of community.

So, how does that translate to our own cities and neighborhoods? A renewed, and perhaps, more authentic interest in contributing to both public gathering places and local venues, specifically third places. Not only that, but crowdsourcing is a natural community-building methodology for doing so. Project for Public

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The question often asked in Michigan, and the U.S. in general nowadays, is ‘What about Detroit?‘  The mass exodus of jobs is well known.

What’s less well known is that much of the city’s historic pedestrian-oriented districts, the very kinds of neighborhoods that are the core magnet for economy-building knowledge workers, have long been destroyed. Not only that, but the present-day urban fabric is immensely auto-oriented, with extra-wide streets and machine-like buildings. So, even if

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Real estate developer Bart Blatstein definitely has Rome on the brain. While the new Piazza at Schmidt’s in Northern Liberties, Philadelphia is inspired by the ancient city’s Piazza Navona, that was only after Blatstein was thwarted in his proposal to re-create the Spanish Steps as part of the Philadelphia waterfront.

However, the car-free character of his developments are no coincidence. Says Blatstein, “My grandfather had a pushcart at 2nd and Laurel Streets in the 1930s, so I’ve always

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