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.

Gentrification is a term we’ve all heard, but few truly understand its complex mechanics. Anne Elizabeth Moore’s memoir “Gentrifier” offers a uniquely personal window into this process, chronicling her experience after winning a “free house” in Detroit through a writer’s residency program.

The concept of “place work” might not be familiar to most urban planners, but it’s a critical element of city life that deserves our attention. In a fascinating conversation on the Booked On Planning podcast, author Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani discusses her book “The Cities We Need: Essential Stories of Everyday Places,” offering insights into how everyday spaces shape our communities and individual identities.

The concept of the Anthropocene—the epoch where human activity fundamentally altered Earth’s systems—has dramatically reshaped how we think about urban planning and design, particularly in cities facing existential climate threats like Miami.