In the latest episode of the Booked On Planning podcast, hosts Stephanie Rouse and Jennifer Hiatt sat down with author and developer Jamie Madden to discuss his new book, Bittersweet Lane: Creating Home(s) in the American Affordable Housing Crisis . Part memoir and part educational guide, the book offers a rare look at the housing crisis from someone who grew up in affordable housing and now spends his career building it. A Multi-Dimensional Perspective on Development Madden’

This episode of Booked On Planning features a conversation with author Mark Dunkelman about his book, "Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back". Dunkelman explains the origins of American progressivism as a response to the upheaval created by railroads and national-scale economic power, outlining two competing impulses within the movement: a Jeffersonian push to break up big institutions and return power to smaller, local actors, and a Hamiltonian push

In the latest episode of Booked on Planning, we dive deep into the ideas and themes behind Zahra Ebrahim's fascinating book, "Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything." This collection of essays explores the multifaceted concept of messiness in urban environments, challenging our typical notions of order and chaos. Throughout the conversation with Zahra, we uncover how this messiness often serves as a testament to a city's diversity and vibrancy. Understanding Messiness in

Cities rarely break all at once; more often they fray through policy choices that seem technical, neutral, even benevolent. Our conversation with historian Emily Lieb traces how Baltimore’s “Road to Nowhere” never reached a ribbon cutting yet still carved deep wounds into Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood. The damage began with a pencil stroke: a highway alignment shifted in the late 1950s to run through Rosemont just as school board actions accelerated racial trans

Livable streets are not just a planning slogan; they are the everyday environments that shape how we think, move, and connect. Bruce Appleyard’s Livable Streets 2.0 revives and expands the classic research on traffic’s invisible harms, showing how speed, volume, and street design quietly erode social ties and negatively impact the health of individuals living on heavily trafficked streets. The original book, published by his father in 1981, documented how lightly trafficked,

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