Piscataquis Village Project

by Nathan Lewis

Every year about this time, we pause and take a little time to imagine what life could be like without cars. For five thousand years of human urban civilization, people didn’t have cars. Their cities reflected this: they were made for walking, mostly, and some wagon traffic. Of course, we don’t need to use oxcarts today. We can move cargo with motorized trucks. But, we can still design our cities to walk around in, rather than to drive around in, as we have in Suburban Hell for roughly a century. Read On….. 

by Andrew Alexander Price

Does block size and street grid really matter? Read on…

by Nathan Lewis – New World Economics

One thing you start thinking about, when you understand what I am talking about regarding the Traditional City, is: why don’t people get it

I think this is, at least in part, because people go round and round what we will call today the Triad of City Design Failure. The triad is:
The 19th Century Hypertrophic City (today called “New Urbanism”)

The 20th Century Hypertrophic City

Suburban Hell

Read on….

Andrew Alexander Price

One of the things I like to do on my blog is to point out a modern norn that does not make much sense to me, yet we grew up with it, and take it for granted, that we rarely question it. In this blog post, I am focusing on paving our streets. Often we spend a lot of money paving and maintaining our streets, just to accommodate cars. I am not advocating that we should not pave our streets, I am just questioning why. Read On…

from the Planner Dan blog

Today, we tend to think of small lots as unusable scraps; nuisances which stand in the way of good development. Many redevelopment efforts focus on the assembly of these lots into workable development sites. The small, wasteful buildings can then be swept away to make room for efficient development. Read on….

From Strong Towns –  CHARLES MAROHN

I’m an engineer, so for a lot of my life I’ve been somewhat dismissive — not intentionally but by default — of many things aesthetic. My first year at the University of Minnesota, I roomed with an architecture major. While I did calculus and physics, he did art history and drawing. It simply confirmed to me that I was in the right academic tract becuase I could not draw and I grew up in a neighborhood where Dogs Playing Pool was considered quality art. I was not cut out to be an architect. Continue Reading…

 Traversing an environment built for the automobile in anything other than an automobile, sucks. Even if you can overcome the inhospitable nature of that, there are others that can not. That person may be your grandmother. Continue reading…

Posted by Chuck Wolfe – My Urbanist

At TEDCity2.0 in New York City the week before last, urban redefinition, reinvention and reimagination ruled. Among the presentations:  that urbanist stand-by, the the most walkable cities in the world.

Mind you, I don’t want to upset the gurus and nabobs of urbanism.  But I’m just back from southern France and Corsica, with contrasting images galore, and a new point of view.

Simply stated. walkable is good, but sit-able is better.  And it’s time for the next big focal point and the next big idea, The Sit-able City.  Complete Post…

Stephanie Garlock – Atlantic Cities

St. Paul-based cartoonist Andy Singer has never owned a car, even though he’s lived, over the last 47 years, in places as diverse as New York City, Ithaca, Oakland, Boston, and now the Twin Cities. He’s clearly a minority among Americans, but he’s made a career out of using art to convince others to rethink their romance with the automobile.  CONTINUE READING….

Piscataquis Village Project investor,  J.H. Crawford, has just published this quarter’s edition of Carfree Times