Reports: Walking

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2008
Cities in the western and eastern US are starting to let motorists and pedestrians deal with one another more intuitively.
Up and down the West Coast and in parts of the East Coast, a select group of streets is going through a radical makeover. The street surfaces are being raised to the same level as the sidewalks. Curbs are being eliminated. Trees and vegetation are extending into what had been the domain of the automobile.

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2009
As the recession bottoms out, planners are looking how to leave room for moderate-income residents in walkable neighborhoods.
Once the nation’s shaken economy recovers, real estate analysts expect a growing number of urban neighborhoods to become so expensive that people of modest income will be priced out of them. This would undermine socioeconomic diversity, which has long been a new urbanist ideal.

Chapter 22 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide
From a health perspective, one of the best things a person can do is to make walking a part of daily life. It’s less dangerous to live in a relatively high-crime city than in a suburb where the crime rate is lower. Also examined is the Lifelong Communities Initiative of the Atlanta Regional Commission, which identified ways of making communities versatile and convenient so that people can live in them at any age.

New Urban News Article with images, 7/1/2004
The Milwaukee Common Council approved a plan on June 15 for redeveloping a mile-long corridor on an edge of downtown where the blighting influence of the Park East Freeway has been eliminated. Demolition of the freeway spur was completed about five months ago, bringing to fruition a longtime goal of John Norquist, who served as Milwaukee’s mayor from 1988 until January of this year, when he resigned to head the Congress for New Urbanism.

New Urban News Article with images, 12/1/2007
“Complete Streets” movement presses a growing number of cities to plan for multimodal transportation.
In 2003, bicyclists intent on obtaining safer routes for cycling concluded that they needed a slogan — one that would communicate their goal to the public clearly and forcefully. Instead of continuing to appeal for “routine accommodation” — the bureaucratic phrase they’d been relying on up to that point — they started demanding “Complete Streets.”

New Urban News Article with images and graph, 6/1/08
Farms and gardens would be key to a self-sustaining 2,000-home development envisioned in British Columbia.
An eight-day charrette in May, led by Andres Duany, laid out an innovative, agriculturally-oriented path that new urbanists could start using in communities that are worried about losing farm land.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell
The benefits promised by New Urbanism spring directly from its emphasis on walking as the main way of moving through the world. Where places are made genuinely walkable, private vehicle mileage likely will be reduced and public transit will certainly be more viable. The convenience and interest of living at higher densities will more than make up for any annoyances. Children, the elderly, and those with physical impairments will gain greater quality and quantity of access, and that sometimes-elusive community glue called social capital is likelier to be produced in places with pedestrians inhabiting a public realm.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2008
The US lending crisis has cut homebuilding nearly everywhere, but walkable, transit-oriented developments are suffering least.
Housing construction across the US has dropped to its lowest volume since 1991, and many new urbanist developments are seeing their sales fall off. The latest Standard & Poors/Case Shiller Home Price Indices, released at the end of September, show that prices of existing single-family houses in 20 large metropolitan areas sank by a stunning 19.5 percent in the past two years.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The varieties of semi-public  spaces must be differentiated from the family of wholly public spaces that includes the square (in its various sub-species), the plaza, and the green. Two of these semi-public  spaces, the quadrangle (formed by individual  buildings)  and the courtyard (formed by a continuous perimeter range) occur at all scales, but most commonly at the scale of the entire block.  A third type, the forecourt, also occurs at different scales, but usually associated only with a single building.