Southern Urbanism

19/08/2026

The University of Miami has one of the best Urban Design programs in the country.

What other schools offer degrees in this specific field?

18/08/2026

What can the Dutch teach us about building sane suburbs in the modern era?

https://youtu.be/nImFJ7KKjAo?si=YyE10dGB0YtOBCp1

What does a suburb look like in the famously bike-friendly country ...

13/08/2026

The new urban transect.

Most of what is built in America today is T3 suburbia.
Traditional urbanism is generally T4 & T5.

11/08/2026

Check out this video explainer of by :
https://loom.ly/qf21z-s

Watch over 2,400 documentaries with Curiosity Stream for free for a...

06/08/2026

A century of neighborhood evolution.

via Congress for the

04/08/2026

🎉 Final Essay in the Series: American Land Use at 250, by Jaime Izurieta

“The myth of eternal return states that a life which disappears once and for all, which does not return, is like a shadow, without weight, dead in advance...”
— Milan Kundera

From Oglethorpe’s fractal wards in Savannah to the audacious 1811 grid of New York. From the layered palimpsest of Miami to the stoop in New Jersey where a dream became tangible. This final piece closes a five-part journey through Southern Urbanism and the American experiment in shaping land, cities, and possibility.

It’s about walls that get broken, maps drawn for people who haven’t arrived yet, and a Dream that keeps returning—renewed by every new arrival who believes in it harder than the last.

America’s greatest act of faith has always been planning for futures that don’t exist yet, and trusting the next person to build better.
The map is not yet finished.

Read the full final essay (via bio) https://www.southernurbanism.org/publish/post/203990214

What part of the American urban story resonates with you most—the ordered grid, the layered palimpsest, or the renewable Dream? Drop your thoughts below.

The Eternal American Return: The Unerasable Republic

28/07/2026

AMERICAN LAND USE at 250: Essay 4, Nick Larkins

Cowboys & Industry: Why America needs BOTH a thriving cityscape and a healthy countryside

“The cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens.” — Thomas Jefferson

The Founders understood that a flourishing nation requires both — the energy and culture of great cities and the virtue, independence, and rootedness of the countryside. Yet today we’ve hollowed out both, creating suburbs as a parasitic middle ground: close enough to the city for jobs, far enough to escape its problems… but belonging to neither.

Cities concentrate culture, cooperation, and the common good. The countryside forges character, self-reliance, and connection to the land. One cannot thrive without the other.

From Jefferson’s yeoman farmers to the mythic cowboy, America’s soul has always lived in this balance. Suburbia tried to split the difference, and failed to deliver on founding values.

🔗 Full essay https://loom.ly/hu-pxLA

#250

The health of American culture depends on building both a healthy cityscape and a healthy countryside, the two halves of the human habitat.

21/07/2026

AMERICAN LAND USE at 250: Essay 3/5
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We have it in our power to begin the world over again. — Thomas Paine

What if the most American thing about cities isn’t the buildings — but the imagination it takes to keep re-drawing them?

In this powerful new essay from the “American Land Use at 250” series, urban planner Billy Cooney traces how his childhood love of action figures and street skateboarding trained him to see cities differently: not as fixed places, but as living maps full of possibility, conflict, and layered dreams.

From skate spots in abandoned factories to buried streetcar tracks and contested zoning codes, he shows how American cities are a palimpsest — old maps written over old maps. And the only way forward is to pair sharp criticism of what’s broken with bold imagination for what could be.

Because being American means never being satisfied with the current map.

🔗 Full essay in bio / stories https://www.southernurbanism.org/publish/post/204011078

#250

How Imagination Shaped Me and My Country

14/07/2026

AMERICAN LAND USE at 250 (Essay 2, by Eli Smith):
250 years ago, we built a nation on something radical: that conflict and disagreement aren’t things to destroy — they’re forces we can harness to create something better.

In this new essay, Elijah Smith explores how mid-20th century urban planning traded messy, tolerant, evolving neighborhoods for utopian visions of perfection — and how we’re still paying the price with zoning that locks out housing, stifles life, and kills the organic grit that makes cities worth loving.

From the founders’ genius of checks and balances… to Robert Moses… to today’s endless community meetings that block anything new… the thread is the same: the dangerous illusion that we can achieve a perfect city if we just control things enough.

Real cities are messy. Real democracy is messy. And that’s the point.

If you care about housing, cities, freedom, or America at 250 — this one’s for you.
🔗 Full essay in bio / link in https://www.southernurbanism.org/publish/post/203855221
📖 “American Land Use at 250” — Part of a 5-part series

What America's founding tells us about citybuilding

07/07/2026

100 Years of Euclid: How One Supreme Court Decision Reshaped America’s Land, Homes, and Opportunities
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This November marks the centenary of Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. — the ruling that constitutionalized modern zoning and changed everything.

What started as a Cleveland suburb’s attempt to protect “residential character” became the legal foundation for restricting property rights, limiting housing supply, inflating prices, and entrenching exclusion. The majority opinion even labeled apartments “parasites.” Newton D. Baker, arguing for Ambler, warned it would lead to politicized control, outdated plans, and a slow erosion of the constitutional right to property — essentially “communistic ownership and control” by local councils.

A century later, the results are clear: power, housing shortages, reduced mobility for working families, and barriers that hit lower-income and minority communities hardest.

At America’s semiquincentennial, it’s time to revisit this precedent. The arc of justice is long — Euclid doesn’t deserve a bicentennial.

Was Euclid a necessary evil or a foundational mistake? 👇
Read Aaron Lubeck’s sharp, timely essay: https://loom.ly/EL2WBdQ (or viaBio)

How a flawed 1926 ruling still undermines American values, ingenuity and self-reliance