Cities & Planning

One year after California cut how much households are paid for surplus power, Puerto Rico is preserving net metering to foster clean energy.

But what would change if we added a number to the hurricane scale?

The state responded to feedback from urbanists and homebuilders by finetuning its draft model code for missing middle housing to be more generous around lot coverage, floor area ratio, setbacks, and design standards.

Our five-part docuseries on the fragilization of the electric grid is on YouTube. It’s free. And it’s terrific.

A vocal critic of highway expansion, Mello's urbanist vision includes "parks and open space trails, a good transportation network, safe places to walk and bike." He's running for County Executive to seek to implement that vision.

Sound Transit is weighing parking rate structures as it works to expand its fledgling paid parking program to a projected 21 facilities along Link and Sounder lines by 2026.

Support is dwindling for the Center City Streetcar project. Failing to connect two disconnected streetcar lines could spell a death spiral for Seattle streetcars, which are limping along without the central link.

Everett Transit's possible consolidation with Community Transit is advancing slower than anticipated, but emerging details suggest that transit riders in Everett could be better off if the city department folded into Snohomish County's larger transit service provider. Under today's paradigm, Everett Transit has just 10 city bus routes with only three of those offering all-day

Transit is woven into America's DNA. Despite car-centric policies, transit remains popular and primed for a comeback.

// A Brief History of a Dysfunctional Relationship When I was writing Straphanger, I had a conversation with a New York Times editor who expressed her skepticism that anyone would be interested in a book about trains, bicycles, and transit. "You're never going to get Americans out of their cars," was

The cost of specialized farm equipment is one of the biggest barriers for small-scale and beginning farmers. Cooperatives are springing up around the nation to help bridge the gap.

Outside of Charleston, South Carolina, in the picturesque marshes of the Kiawah River, sits more than 100 acres of working farmland. Seasonal crops rotate

Source:  curbed.com (Janna Morton) Let’s talk about the nation’s housing affordability crisis. I recently downloaded some 2023 third qua...

Seattle is in a pickle with its streetcars, especially the near-empty ones in SLU. Could a free municipal Uber service be an answer? Bellevue is trying it.

Cities today are mostly rooms in (home/office/store) units in buildings separated by roads. Besides roads, cities provide city services like power, water, sewage, and telecom. Buildings channel these services to units and add more like lights, air/heat, security, and elevators. Units are managed by particular orgs, who may add further local services like receptionists and IT, while people and small groups have their own rooms, over which they have some discretion.

Earth’s acoustic environment has been profoundly altered by noise, but it’s not too late to change course.

The Green Point Knife Truck is carrying on the craft of mobile knife sharpening for restaurants and home cooks alike

The ThingsCon report The State of Responsible IoT is an annual collection of essays by experts from the ThingsCon community. With the Riot Report 2018 we want to investigate the current state of…

This story was originally published by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action. In the more than a decade since Alabama regulators allowed a landfill to take in tons of waste from coal-burning power plants around the U.S., neighbors in the majority-Black community of Uniontown frequently complain of thick air […]

Coast redwoods draw visitors from around the world to California. But the trees are also found all over Washington, if you know where to look.

It’s a sobering, if not surprising, assessment of a project talked about for more than a decade by an array of City Councils and mayoral administrations.

Transit conveys culture as its conveys passengers. The former Russian capital provides some lessons on how the Seattle region could do better. Seattle has begun constructing a major light rail system with Link, defining the contours of its urban development for generations. Every mile of track laid and station opened speaks to the region’s values.

A scene from the game Cities: VR. Source:  vrscout.com   (Note: First, Happy New Year. Here's my first post of 2024. It's long, it's introsp...

Misunderstanding the size of an acre, floor area ratio, and the area of a circle ruins many conversations about the basic shape of where you live.

Planners’ preference for urban density should not supersede Americans’ preferences for suburban or exurban living.

Seattle's infrastructure is not at all prepared for what will become normal: extreme weather events.

Researchers are working with communities in Puerto Rico to build more sustainable systems in the face of ongoing challenges.

The yearlong pilot could be the first step in creating a residential-storage virtual power plant larger than any in North America.

Landfills are a major contributor to the overheating of our planet, but a new study shows how we can change that.