Free Republic

How do we save the Crescent City? Re-create the unique building culture that spawned it. ___ Like so many others, I have long been a visitor to New Orleans. In my case this goes back to 1979, when we studied the city to influence the design of Seaside, Florida. I have often been back because New Orleans is one of the best places to learn architecture and urbanism in the United States. My emphasis on design might seem unusual, but it shouldn’t: the design of New Orleans has a quality and character comparable to the music and cuisine that receive...

If you think the highest and best use of a street is to move as many cars as fast as possible, shrinking the pavement probably seems counterintuitive, if not downright loony. But it's starting to happen here and there, in Madison, Milwaukee, suburban Green Bay and neo-traditional subdivisions around the country. Hooray for the "skinny streets" movement. It's helping to make neighborhoods safer for children and pedestrians, encourage more compact development and save resources. If only the boomlet would expand into our own sprawling metro suburbs, with residential streets as wide as airport runways. "It's not anti-car; it just makes...

Larger housing projects squeeze into Charlotte's core ___At first glance, site work at a west Charlotte development called Lela Court might look like just another subdivision. But this is something different. This planned 147-home development is big infill. The 13-acre project, under way adjacent to the Wesley Heights Historic District, illustrates just how far one of the urban core's hottest trends has come in 30 years. In the early days, developers dabbled in small infill -- filling in gaps in established neighborhoods with new homes or condos generally on small vacant or underused lots. Small-scale infill is still occurring citywide,...

It's long been an irony that the same American who gushes over a delightful corner patisserie in the 16th arrondissement buys into a subdivision that is the antithesis of Parisian street life. There are no corner bakeries in the gently curving streets of suburbia, for an Old World clutter of transit, shops and residences is precisely what's been designed out of the suburban landscape. Does the irony lie in our rote desire for a suburban home, or in the fact we've had so few choices? Many of us would love to live in an urban neighborhood rich with transit and...

We're living in the age of the great dispersal. Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. But the truly historic migration is from the inner suburbs to the outer suburbs, to the suburbs of suburbia. From New Hampshire down to Georgia, across Texas to Arizona and up through California, you now have the booming exurban sprawls that have broken free of the gravitational pull of the cities and now float in a new space far beyond them. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since 1980, but as...

SANTA CLARITA, Calif. -- This past week's cataclysm of fire will go down as one of the worst disasters in the history of Southern California, killing at least 20 people, destroying more than 3,300 homes and laying waste to more than three-quarters of a million acres. It is likely to happen again. According to scientists who study the urban ecology of the Los Angeles basin, more catastrophic wildfires are a near certainty, fed by sprawl, poor fire-prevention strategies, arsonists and local vegetation that, by its very nature, needs to burn.