Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Practical Confessions of an Urbanist Pilgrim


If you want to learn about cities today, take a long walk along rural trails and through historic cities and towns. All photos by Charles R. Wolfe After 12 days of walking the Portuguese Camino, the importance of many urban planning and development concepts — from the urban-to-rural Transect to balanced growth — became abundantly […]

A Good Read for Planners and Peers: Why Old Places Matter


The role of historic preservation — or “heritage” as it’s often termed overseas — is a conundrum faced regularly in the planning and development world. In rapidly changing cities with redevelopment incentives, “what to save” is front-page news, and the loss of special places is forever memorialized. I’ve often advocated getting down to the […]

On Different Ways to See a Place


Looking forward to 2019, Chuck Wolfe reflects on how time living in London — and exposure to many other places during 2018 — has highlighted how the physical shell of the old often frames today’s sociocultural realities around the world. Isleworth, Hounslow, London My time living in London for the last year — as well as exposure […]

The Baselines of Public Space? Corners.


More so than public squares — which require a conscious set-aside of assembled space — corners naturally result from crossroads, the time-honored, elemental feature of travel between places. A corner in Karatu, Tanzania The corner is the central place of urban life. Ancient, grid-based Roman military towns, or castra, were planned around crossroads and their corners. […]