This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Traffic is essentially "an engineering issue," says author Tom Vanderbilt. "But there's also a layer of culture." That layer of culture determines, to a large extent, how traffic can become a problem. This idea is explored in Vanderbilt's 2008 book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), a Planetizen Top Book of the year. He recently expanded on that idea for a discussion about traffic put on by Zocalo Public Square in …

  This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. I couldn't resist. I knew it was going to be a madhouse in downtown L.A. for Michael Jackson's memorial service, but I had to go see what it was like -- not because I'm a super fan, but purely for the urban novelty of a huge swath of downtown closed off for thousands of fans and mourners. But what really struck me as I was wandering around amongst the masses was the huge percentage of them that were …

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Cities are filled with spaces intended for the public -- but many of them are clearly owned and operated by the private sector. Though cities bend rules to get these spaces built, the public benefit is often outweighed by the cost. The challenge now is to make them better. The difference between what is public and what is private is usually pretty clear. A city park is available to everyone. Your neighbor's living room is not. But the line …

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. The green marketplace is the marketplace of the future. From Wal-Mart to Toyota to the neighborhood dry cleaner, it seems like every business is going out of its way to tell us how green it is. That could either be a great thing, because these businesses are actually using environmentally friendly practices, or it could be a bad thing, because they're just claiming to be green. Regardless of which it is, one thing is certain: they say they're green …

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web's leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Green alley projects are popping up in cities all over the U.S. and Canada, in an effort to make the concrete jungle a little better at absorbing rainwater. A new program in Los Angeles goes beyond the runoff to actively integrate these once-derelict spaces into the urban fold. Across Los Angeles, the city's alleyways account for more than 900 linear miles of pavement. If you put them all together, the city's alleys would make up about 3 square miles …