Cities & Planning

The New Year presents the opportunity to consider the possibilities that lay ahead for our next 365 days encircling the sun. Because at The Urbanist we are pretty obsessed with places, especially i…

A once common arrangement that can help or strain work-life balance is being sustained by a new generation of New Yorkers.

From chief heat officers to circular communities, cities are constantly serving as laboratories for bold new models. Here are a few favorites from the past year.

Supply chains are clogged and driving is getting more dangerous. 2023’s autonomous vehicles could help fix both.

Companies like Vivos and Rising S offer luxury shelters with amenities that include underground pools, gardens, horse stables, and entire villages.

Anonymous Desert 2011 A German language translation of Desert can be found here: anarchistischebibliothek.org/library/anonym-desert, and a Greek language...

The Federal Highway Administration has a chart full of answers to that question you might find useful.

This page is a summary of the different cost classes we look at in this blog; each class listed below is explored in detail in its own post. Using the 2013 AECOM high-speed rail study as a starting point, numerous additional sources have been used to either confirm or question the reliability of the

This article examines the capital costs of recent rail transit projects and describes some factors that help to explain the differences in costs.

Is our love of cars so overwhelming? Or do cars just make us dumb?

The “crazy worms” remaking forests aren’t your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren’t so great either.

Restarted by Governors Inslee and Brown in 2019, the IBR has been on a glidepath toward repeating the mistakes of the failed Columbia River Crossing project. When state lawmakers from both Oregon a…

"If my choices are to have wealth but no job, or to have a job but no wealth, I’d rather have the wealth. But we don’t have to choose: we can have both wealth and jobs, if we don’t go around breaking all the darned windows." ~ Michael C. Munger

Global heating will set the stage for extreme weather everywhere in 2023. The consequences are likely to be cataclysmic.

Although electric vehicles have advanced significantly, many other forms of mobility do not share their shortcomings.

Earlier this month, a mixture of snow and freezing rain set a stark backdrop as 30 residents, including families with children, couples, singles, and people with pets, moved into their new heated a…

Europe’s energy crisis is forcing companies to switch strategies or close down. The industry’s future hangs in the balance.

For decades, 1960s research for the American Petroleum Institute warning of the risks of burning fossil fuels had been forgotten. But two papers discovered in libraries are now playing a key role in lawsuits aimed at holding oil companies accountable for climate change.

From Seattle to Baltimore, cities are recycling felled urban trees into furniture, construction projects and guitars.

The Downtown Seattle Association and new SDOT head are seeking ways to jumpstart the shelved Center City Streetcar project, such as a Cultural Connector program. Seattle’s Center City streetc…

The tech giant’s development concept is rapidly growing Kirkland’s most ambitious proposal To close out The Urbanist’s series on Kirkland’s recent and ongoing developments, …

One of the world’s first upcycled towers shows how reusing the bones of a building can be an environmentally and economically viable solution for the world’s aging towers.