About and Contact
Urban planning and design are an attempt to order the human-made environment at its largest scales. In its broadest definition, the field includes everything outside of individual buildings, from arrangements of land uses, to the sizes and locations of parks, to specific road designs. People have done urban design in one form or another for thousands of years for a variety of reasons. Far from only aesthetic in nature, planning and design are at the core of the way a city functions, from the individual neighborhood to the regional scale. As concerns about climate change have become ever more widely known and discussed in the last decade, the central role of planning and design and their affect on carbon emissions and urban resilience has also become more clear. High quality and high performance urban planning and design are at the heart of a holistic environmentalism.
This website contains a few of my writings on urban design, with much of my point of view shaped by my many years at Calthorpe Associates and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and my education at the Berkeley College of Environmental Design. A few of my photos and other projects are also included here. Also related to my design work, but in the field of software, is my iPad app for architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, Arrette.
Please contact me with questions or comments with the form below.
