an insight

When I first started learning about urban design, I naturally began with the popular books — Walkable City, Streetfight, Happy City, among others. These books are excellent, and they do a great job at giving you the big picture. But because they’re working at that scale, it’s naturally hard for them to fit in all the nuance.

Pretty quickly, I noticed they all circle back to the same two names: Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Jacobs is usually framed as the community-minded underdog; Moses as the top-down power broker. Those quick references build a neat, surface-level mental model: Jacobs good, Moses bad. Even if the underlying facts hold up, that kind of shorthand is still risky — it flattens real people into symbols, and I didn’t want that to keep settling into my brain with every new book I read.

an insight

My hot take: ground-floor businesses have an obligation to meet the street.

That doesn’t always mean spilling out onto the sidewalk with tables and benches (though that’s great, when possible). It can be as simple as letting people see life inside instead of hiding it away.

new resource

Chasing total quiet is nearly impossible, and isn’t always the most effective goal. As Clamor by Chris Berdik points out, noise is more than loudness. Quality, duration, and source matter just as much. Focusing only on decibels can miss the bigger opportunity: creating soundscapes that are balanced, intentional, and worth listening to.

an insight

Today, it might seem obvious that tall towers surrounded by manicured lawns don’t make for great neighborhoods. But in the 1930s, they looked like a cure: a clean solution to the dirt and disease of crowded cities. Green space for everyone. Sunshine in every window. A modern life, elevated.

It was all good intentions. As Jan Gehl wrote in Life Between Buildings:

an insight

Stroll down Washington Street in Providence and you will spot a garage with a row of shops at street level. It wasn't always like this — until 2012, it was just parking. That year, Cornish Associates reworked the ground floor to add retail, helping tie the block together and bring more life to the street.

new resource

Soft City by David Sim is a visual, down-to-earth guide to building cities that feel good to live in — walkable, cozy, and tailored to human scale. Instead of long commutes and isolated buildings, Sim shows how thoughtful design can create dense but comfortable neighborhoods full of life and connection.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes from the book:

an insight

There’s a certain atmosphere in former factory towns. Maybe you’ve felt it walking through cities like Providence, Worcester, or Pittsburgh. Maybe you’ve felt it through a painting.

Light might have something to do with it.

an insight

In an effort to make parks safer, cities sometimes make them less inviting and, paradoxically, more dangerous. Walls, fences, fewer entrances, and limited seating are meant to deter unwanted activity, but they often have the opposite effect. When a park becomes empty, it can feel unwelcoming and unsafe.

A better approach is to encourage movement and activity. The more people are passing through, the safer a space becomes.

an insight

It’s always heartbreaking when a brick road is ripped up for utility work and then left sealed with cement.

I’ve seen it happen countless times in Boston and Providence. To be fair, some roads do get restored — but that’s the exception, not the rule.

an insight

A hotel that used to be a firehouse.
An apartment building that used to be a jewelry factory.
A coffee shop that used to be a gas station.

Some places carry their past with them, making their present even more compelling.

an insight

In Inclusive Transportation, Veronica Davis highlights how framing our goals shapes the solutions we create — how we define a problem determines how we solve it.

If we aim to move 50,000 vehicles, we focus on highways, wider roads, and traffic flow. But if we shift the goal to moving 50,000 people, we open the door to broader solutions — public transit, bike lanes, and walkability.

an insight

“The future of an urban form built primarily around detached single-family homes is very much in question today. Most attempts to rate cities for sustainability, as well as many commentators on city planning, leap quickly to the conclusion that the city dominated by single-family homes cannot continue. Coupled with the intellectual critique of the suburbs is a repeated analysis of trends purporting to show that baby boomers and millennials are rapidly moving back into higher-density urban places.

Nevertheless, the single-family-home-dominated tableau remains a dominant urban form throughout the United States and increasingly throughout the world.

…

an insight

“Healthy minds continuously integrate their differentiated parts. Mental-health issues all begin with impaired integration of the brain. Chaos theory observes that when a self-organizing system is not able to link differentiated parts, it moves to chaos or rigidity. The same happens with the mind—Siegel [Daniel Siegel, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine] notes that almost all mental disabilities can be categorized as chaos, rigidity, or both. Cities, too, are healthier when they link their differentiated parts.

Cities can also be overly rigid or chaotic, or find the right path in between. Rigidity often arises from centralized command and control, as in Soviet cities of the mid-twentieth century, and more recently in cities ruled by Islamic fundamentalism. In such cases, there is no place for individualism or self-expression; diversity, the source of generative capacity, is repressed. Rigid urban infrastructures are incapable of readily adapting to change.

an insight

“No walk, as far as I am concerned, is ever wasted. In contrast, for example, to a car journey. In a city—especially one dominated by cars, by individualistic rather than collective, private rather than public modes of transport—it is walking that habitually makes me feel alive. It makes me feel both vitally connected to the city's ceaseless circuits of energy and, at the same time, delicately detached from them. Stimulant, then, and narcotic.”

Matthew Beaumont, The Walker

insights

“There is much hyperventilating about helmets in cities around the world, but there is no evidence that requiring riders to wear bike helmets is more effective in decreasing injury and death rates than the very real effect of safety in numbers — the cumulative safety effect of having more people on bikes riding the streets. On the contrary, there is growing evidence that cities with helmet laws succeed only in significantly decreasing the number of people riding bikes, reducing crashes but forfeiting the safety benefits of more riders.”

“As more people bike, their visibility on the street increases. When drivers see more bike riders, they learn to expect them, to anticipate their movements. They slow down and look around when they have to share the road, which also protects people who walk, completing a virtuous cycle. By the logic of helmet proponents, European nations like Denmark and the Netherlands, with vast numbers of cyclists riding without helmets, should see sky-high rates of head injuries. Yet they are far safer than other countries and are becoming only more so as the number of cyclists increases.”

new resources

• Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World by Henry Grabar

• Crossings: How Road Ecology Is Shaping the Future of Our Planet by Ben Goldfarb

new resources

• Triumph of the City by Edward Glaeser

• Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg

• Cosmopolitan Culture by Bonnie Menes Kahn

new resources

• The Option of Urbanism by Christopher B. Leinberger

• Retrofitting Suburbia by Ellen Dunham-Jones

• Cities and the Wealth of Nations by Jane Jacobs