Choosing to value access over flow creates long-term value.

Our neighborhoods and cities are laden with wider roadways in the name of mobility and economic development. They are not living up to the design process, imagery, and vision established by the architect or planning professional.

Helping people get from point A to B as quickly as possible is antithetical to the fundamentals of making places for people and innovation.

For most urban planners, we are living in a pattern set before us. We evolved out of the landscape architecture profession - the era of Olmsted, Burnham, Mumford, Wright.

Regenerative place development empowers places to understand their environment, get good at their fundamentals, and innovate while playing the game.

Building connected, vibrant, diverse, and inclusive neighborhoods are possible only when we choose to move beyond the 20th-century city planning model.

When we draw up plans, it’s vital to capture as much as possible. The entrepreneur, retiree, CEO, mom, high school student, person without a home, and the lawn maintenance person sees things differently.

Places are always evolving. The ability to adapt to change requires a more agile practice. Agility is the essence of regenerative place development

The decline of a place is not inevitable. However, the road to poverty is paved with good intentions.

Genesis. Marking the beginning of something new is exciting. Something is alluring about starting fresh and launching something new.

Place development professionals enjoy being creators and guides to help neighborhood and cities discover their essence (strengths, assets, opportunities) that will lead to being a place where you desire and can afford to live, work, learn, and play.

It’s unsettling to think that wealth concentrates. The hot place to live today is overlooked by the newer and better neighborhood of tomorrow.

For most of us, generations before us set our pattern. We wake up every day somewhere. That somewhere is familiar and known to us. For some, we love it. For others, we wish there was another somewhere we could be.

Decline and disintegration does not just "happen." The coronavirus pandemic is accelerating well-known trends - both positive and negative. It's a lot easier to talk about the acceleration of trends like remote work and food delivery. It's a lot harder but necessary to discuss race, class, placemaking, and urban economics. However, if we continue to structure conversations, policy-making, and doing in an either/or way of thinking, then we will only repeat and reinforce divisions.