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| As a child, I loved to color maps, or copy the ones in the phone book with tracing paper |
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(4/22/2026) My urbanist journey began when I taught a first-year course on place at Coe College in 2008. Or maybe it was earlier? I have loved maps since I was tiny (see above). But it was teaching a course at Coe on the Sense of Place that led me to a semester-long study on sabbatical in spring semester 2013....
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| temporary downtown library |
...where I kept running across books on the topic of urban design.
I had found my people! I began a blog to sort out all these new (to me) ideas...
...and here we are! On Holy Mountain, I pay a lot of attention to design issues, both in my hometown of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and in places where I travel, particularly where I'm able to spend a good deal of time in one place, like Washington, D.C. (spring 2018)...
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| Our street, February 2018 |
...and Belgrade, Serbia (May2022).
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| Our street, May 2022 |
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Urbanism is a movement of architects, planners, and others that has its roots in a number of ideas that came together as the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993. I joined CNU in 2020, and have been a member of Strong Towns since whenever they started having memberships.
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| Coming next month! Watch this space for live coverage!! |
The thread that runs through all of the ideas that comprise urbanism is a critique of auto-centric development, which took off in this country after World War II.
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| Memorial Boulevard runs through downtown Providence RI |
Sprawl occurs when a metropolitan area relies on low-density housing developments, located far from place to work, connected by vast networks of highways. Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles are famous for their sprawled layout and awful traffic, but it's plenty visible even in older cities like Chicago, and certainly has occurred in Cedar Rapids albeit on a smaller scale.
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| Collins Road NE, Cedar Rapids |
One year I sorted out the main urbanist critiques this way (relevant questions are from a list at Alden 2015):
- Community: sprawl separates people and makes it harder to be neighbors to each other (Jacobs 1962, Jacobson 2012)--how do we built stronger social networks?
- Lifestyle: sprawl forces people to drive wherever they're going, and to spend a lot of time in traffic--can we improve walkability so that people have more time and transportation choices (Speck 2012)?
- Environmental: sprawl wastes energy resources, pollutes air and water, and contributes substantially to global climate change--how can we sustain our society at lower environmental cost? (Hester 2006)
- Financial: sprawl makes cities poor, because they can never collect enough tax revenue to pay for all the infrastructure it requires, and it makes individuals poor, because regardless of means they are forced to pay for expensive transportation--how do we make municipal finances more stable? (Marohn 2020)
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| Northland Square on Black Friday 2025 |
New urbanism's response begins with traditional neighborhoods, which form the basis of communities that are (Duany et al. 2010, ch 4; Calthorpe and Fulton 2001, chs 1 & 2, Hester 2006):
- walkable and human-scaled: safe for bikes and pedestrians, interesting (signs of human activity), comfortable (creating a sense of enclosure with street trees and buildings), with meaningful destinations (Speck 2012)
- diverse in population: American writ small, with people from every economic class, race, gender and sexual preference, religion, ethnicity, you name it
- varied in uses: residences, shops, offices and schools close to each other... sometimes in mixed-use buildings
- supplied with public spaces that serve as community centers and landmarks, attract different kinds of people, and foster a sense of commonality
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| St. Paul's United Methodist Church was built in 1914 in the Wellington Heights neighborhood |
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Like all municipalities, Cedar Rapids contains examples of both good and bad urban design. There are no perfect places, but people in every community need to understand opportunities and constraints in setting their goals.
Good urbanism in Cedar Rapids
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| Connecting the bike trails network |
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| More sidewalks |
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| Parks |
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| Redeveloped core |
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| One way to two way conversions |
Bad urbanism in Cedar Rapids
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| Stroads |
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| Lack of basic commerce in the core |
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| MedQuarter |
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| Casino |
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| I-380 slices through the core (Google Earth screenshot) |
SEE ALSO:
"Gleanings from the New Urbanism," 19 April 2013
"The Urbanism CLEF," 4 February 2016
"Urbanism Review," 22 August 2017
PRINT REFERENCES:
Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Island, 2001)
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the ,American Dream (North Point, 2010)
Randolph T. Hester, Design for Ecological Democracy (MIT Press, 2006)
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, [1961] 1993)... reviewed by Dave Alden here
Eric O. Jacobson, The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012)
Jeff Speck, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2011)... reviewed by Dave Alden here
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