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Cities
Agriculture is the New Golf: Rethinking Suburban Communities
There is new movement to plan suburban communities around farms instead of golf courses. Can it catch on? It has often been observed that...
Cities
Ghost Town: The Abandoned Suburb of California City
Revisiting one of America’s most unusual neighborhoods: the abandoned suburb of California City. Abandoned starter houses taken over by...
Cities
Returning to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe
An appreciation of Fred RogersOn the continuum of awesome compound words, “make-believe” ranks very near the top. I learned the term courtesy of...
Cities
The Case Against Fake "Walkable Urbanism"
If You Lived Here, You'd Be Urban By Now: The case against a "walkable urbanism" that is neither walkable nor urban. In December, an...
Cities
Picture Show: Crowdsourcing the World's Greatest Imaginary Neighborhood
Imagining the ideal street What if all your favorite places from around the world—that taco stand on the Mexican border, that hat store in...
Cities
A Promise Worth Keeping: Can the Harlem Children's Zone Work Anywhere?
By most accounts, the Harlem Children’s Zone has been a slam dunk. But now that the model is expanding to 20 other cities, it’s worth asking:...
Cities
Model Town
GOOD imagines the perfect neighborhood History and science fiction have taught us that there’s no such thing as a perfect society. The term...
Cities
Project: Help Us Create Neighbor Day
Admit it: Your neighborhood isn’t like Mister Rogers’s. You don’t know the name of your postal carrier or beat cop, or even the person who...
Cities
Meet Your Neighbors Without Seeming like a Crazy Person
Just because delivering a Jell-O mold to welcome a newcomer to the block is creepy doesn’t mean you’re destined to live a lonely, anonymous...
Cities
What's in a Name?
Nowadays, neighborhood sobriquets are designed by marketing gurus to make an area more appealing. In 100 years, that story will be forgotten,...
Cities
Street Scene: Great Neighborhood Street Art
Even the best and most striking street art can exist with almost no connection to the walls on which it appears. Some artists, however, take...
Cities
The LION's Share: Don't Just Buy Local, Invest
Don’t just buy local, invest local: One town’s plan to buy stock in their own community. We’ve all been told to buy locally, but when it comes...
Cities
A Borrower and a Lender Be
Could the threat of a peaking oil supply lead to a hyperlocal revolution? A group of Portlanders thinks so.Normally, when you need compost for...
Cities
Get a Billboard Taken Down (or at Least Complain About One)
If you don’t happen to live in one of the states where billboards are illegal (Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, and Vermont), you probably live, work, or...
Cities
The Great Desprawling Experiment
Can Tyson Corner show the country how to fix its suburbs? “A textbook case of suburban sprawl”—that’s what local officials call the northern...
Cities
Wiped Off the Hypothetical Map
Imagine the cobblestone streets of New York City’s SoHo neighborhood uprooted and replaced by a six-lane elevated highway; not a pretty sight....
Cities
Plots of Land
GOOD’s favorite fictional neighborhoods Appears in: Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck. The neighborhood is arguably the main character in this...
Cities
You Are Where You Live: What Makes a Perfect Neighborhood?
Richard Florida is one of the world’s best-known urban theorists. In his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida explored how...
