Spiritual wellness sits in a blind spot in city-making. We measure traffic counts and hospital beds, yet struggle to name why a stroll under trees soothes us or how a plaza can lift a crowd into awe. Architect and planner Phillip Tabb draws a clear line: wellness is preventative, place-based, and social, while much of today’s investment flows to curative health systems. That gap shapes cities. He distinguishes spirituality from religion not to water it down, but to point towa

Cities shape climate outcomes more than most people realize. Local land use decisions influence how far we drive, how much energy our buildings use, and whether open space can continue to store carbon. In this conversation with Professor John Nolan, we unpack how municipal powers can touch roughly 75 percent of national CO2 emissions through transportation patterns, building performance, biological sequestration, and the siting of distributed and renewable energy. The message

The core argument of this conversation is deceptively simple: the greenest building is the one that already exists. Carl Elefante pushes us to see beyond the last 200 years of urban design and into a 6,000-year encyclopedia of city-making. He frames modern urban eras as City 1.0 and 2.0, then sketches a City 3.0 that reconnects with outcomes, community, earth, and place. That means valuing permanence, adapting buildings, and designing streets for people and climate rather tha

America’s roads tell a story of ambition, incentives, and unintended outcomes. The interstate era promised speed, safety, and national reach; the funding machine that built it never really wound down. As Erick Guerra explains, we finished the planned network around 1991 and then kept going, adding roughly 75 percent more urban highway lane miles. The result is a system that delivers higher average speeds but worse mobility where it matters. We also inherited a financial burde

Streets shape daily life more than any other civic asset, yet most American cities still treat them like narrow pipes for cars. This episode explores a different frame: streets as social infrastructure.

Parking sounds mundane until you realize it acts like an operating system for the modern city. On our live episode recorded at the APA Nebraska Fall Workshop with journalist and author Henry Grabar, we trace how a space designed for storing cars came to shape housing, transit, budgets, safety, climate resilience, and even what kinds of buildings are legal to construct. From early street management to mid‑century mandates, parking policy filters into everything residents notic

Housing is an integral component of our everyday lives, influencing everything from our economic well-being to our psychological health....

In "Before Gentrification: The Creation of DC's Racial Wealth Gap," author Tanya Maria Golash-Boza challenges the common misconception that the racial wealth gap in Washington DC primarily stems from Black families' inability to access homeownership.