The underlying principles of walkable urbanism are these: 1. The basic building block of a community is the neighborhood. A neighborhood standing alone can be a village or a small town. A cluster of neighborhoods forms a bigger town. Clusters of many neighborhoods make up a city. 2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with a well-defined edge and a center. The size of a neighborhood is usually based on the distance that a person can walk in five minutes from the center to the edge — a quarter-mile. Neighborhoods have a fine-grained mix of land uses, providing opportunities...

Yesterday at the People & Nature Conference I learned that the Public Works Department and the City of Houston are acquiring right of way along some major corridors with the intention of widening them. There can be no public benefit to widening Houston's streets at a time when population and job density are both growing vigorously. It is clearly time to make wiser - and safer, and more convenient - use of our public right of way. The proposal for reconfiguring parts of West Alabama removes a car lane but will improve auto throughput in the corridor. It is the most advanced public...

These blog posts are published and mostly written by David Crossley, in Houston, Texas. Crossley has been a journalist for more than 50 years, a period that included time as a science writer focused on physics and space, as editor of Houston City Magazine, as the CEO of Houston's first multimedia company, as one of the City's first website developers, as a photographer, and as the principal communicator for a variety of nonprofit organizations, some of which he founded or co-founded. During his career, he has focused research and publication on sustainable development, smart growth, and quality...