Angie Schmitt

Everyone's paying tribute to Jane Jacobs today, on what would be the pioneering urbanist's 100th birthday. Jacobs' classic critique of mid-century American urban planning dogma, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is probably the most influential book ever written about planning. But her legacy is also contested, and her ideas still go unheeded in most cities. Was she too averse to change? And how do her theories of city-building work in practice?

It's not enough for highway builders to carve out land at great public expense so they can jam more cars into cities. Now they want you to believe their projects are great for the neighborhoods that bear the brunt of the added traffic and pollution.

Right now, the Seattle region is hashing out how to spend $50 billion to expand transit. The project list, known as ST3, is tilted heavily toward the suburbs, not the urban core where ridership would be higher.

Boris Johnson says that one of his goals as mayor of London was to make cycling "more popular and more normal." As Johnson's eight-year tenure winds down, it looks like the progress he made in his second term has accomplished that mission.

Impermeable surfaces like parking lots are terrible for the environment in several ways, including the water pollution that results when stormwater runoff causes sewer systems to overflow. In Ohio, the state's highest court recently upheld a fee on parking lots to help mitigate the damage to water quality.

Every once in a while you have to step back and gape at the sheer scale of the highway interchanges America has built smack in the middle of our cities.

This video from the Minneapolis-based satirical site Wedge LIVE sends up the not-in-my-backyard resistance to infill development that could help alleviate the shortage of affordable housing affecting a growing number of American cities.

Every so often someone (usually Joel Kotkin) tries to make the case that the rapid growth of Houston, as opposed to say, Chicago, is evidence that Americans love sprawl.

Governors of the states surrounding the Great Lakes are considering a water policy case with big implications for land development throughout the Midwest.

Will the Obama administration prod state DOTs to abandon the destructive practice of widening roads and highways, or will it further entrench policies that have hollowed out cities and towns, increased traffic and car dependence, and made America a world leader in carbon pollution?