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Accessibility for persons with disabilities, New Urbanist planners and architects will tell you, is an important principle. Still, other New Urbanist principles can come into conflict with accessibility; or, at least, they often clash with interpretations of the Americans With Disabilities Act, or with accessibility as defined by disability-rights advocates. Take February’s “Lifelong Communities” charette in Atlanta, at which Congress for the New Urbanism co-founder Andres Duany and Eleanor Smith, of the organization Concrete Change, were able to agree on the removal of requirements for elevated entries from the Duany Plater-Zyberk SmartCode—prized by New Urbanists for the privacy they enable, but a barrier for wheelchairs—but had to agree to disagree on issues including the utility of walk-up apartments located above retail.

Toronto, Ontario, is, by any measure, one of North America’s greenest and most sustainable cities. It is also, by some accounts, the continent’s densest metropolis – but this is due in large part to the hundreds upon hundreds of “slab” highrises that sprouted across its outer neighborhoods in the postwar era. While Toronto’s “commie blocs,” as they’ve been derisively dubbed, provide the sort of residential density necessary to support transit and walkability, they are limited in their effectiveness by acres of surrounding lawn. Enter the Mayor’s Tower Renewal Program, which would first retrofit the buildings to make them more energy-efficient during long Canadian winters, then, over the long term, would encourage urban food gardens and mixed-use development on their grounds. Refitting, rather than demolition and new construction, could save the city as much as $55 billion. In the name of efficiency, the plan calls to house all decision-making parties for the redevelopment of apartment communities under one roof, effectively combining transit and energy planning with the designing of land use codes.


 

Since the Madrid-Barcelona leg of Spain’s AVE high-speed rail system opened last year, air travel in the corridor has been cut by half. But bullet trains aren’t just changing the ways Spaniards get around: according to an article in the Wall Street Journal, they are literally uniting the country, and revitalizing rural areas. Spaniards historically have been reluctant to travel, but “the AVE has radically changed [the younger] generation’s attitude,” a professor noted. Meanwhile, the once-forgotten town of Ciudad Real, now a 50-minute commute to Madrid (a distance of 120 miles), is booming as new residents take advantage of sudden proximity to the capital: new students from other regions are enrolling at the once isolated university; businesses have moved in; and an airport is being built next to the town’s train station, marketed as a cheap alternative to Madrid’s.

National Geographic recently featured a photo essay of green roofs around the world. Featured projects included the Academy of Sciences (of course!), but also a Civic Center bus shelter that SPUR's green roofs task force worked hard to design and build. Diane Loviglio, a task force leader, came up with the idea that was later funded by the Academy as a way to bring green roofs to the pedestrian realm.