Welcome - my name is Kevin Klinkenberg, and this site "The Messy City" is my blog and company website. I started blogging on urban planning and design issues in 2007, and began working in the field in 1993. Please feel free to connect with me on any of the social media sites listed here. Thanks for reading.
All tagged downtown
Kevin Klinkenberg of 180º Urban Design on form based codes and understanding the transect.
The downtown is surrounded on all sides by an incoherent network of strip malls and subdivisions connected by mostly unwalkable roads. This is not an accident, and it is not just the invisible hand of the market at work. It reflects political decisions to zone residential and commercial space separately, to require that every new house have a parking space but not necessarily a sidewalk, and to build at low densities. In fact, without rezoning, it would be illegal to build the beloved downtown in Leesburg today.
New Urbanism Blog: Colorado Springs is embarking on two ambitious planning efforts designed to guide and shape growth in the heart of the city for years to come using using form-based codes.
Who doesn’t want a healthy downtown? The truth is, universally people declare that they wish their immediate downtown was vibrant and healthy, as well as other downtowns in the region. And yet we seem to struggle to achieve this in so many of our communities.
