Cook County once led the way in planning for and building the expressways that now run through the heart of the city. I reported on the county's first comprehensive transportation plan since 1940, writing for BuiltWorlds. The new plan is about walking and bicycling and simply trying to hold the huge system together. How times have changed.

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is a very interesting attempt to build a low-carbon sustainable city in the Middle East. Far from creating a sudden Utopia, the planners are gradually assembling the elements of the city and learning a lot along the way. Their “greenprint” for sustainable city making is becoming a model for the Middle East and possibly the world. When I visited in 2015, I was impressed with the regional planning for all of Abu Dhabi that guides the development of Masdar. I wrote an essay for CNU Journal, New eco-city combines ancient...

Planning codes are interesting when applied in regional schemes, so I wrote this article for the APA Regional newsletter, Frontier of form-based codes. Whether the 'floating zone' towns and villages ever get built as planned is another story.

My first published article was about the Coffee Creek conservation development in Indiana. It appeared in Urban Land in June, 2000. The year before, my last year in graduate studies, I won a fellowship from the Urban Land Institute which offered an opportunity to write for the magazine. I was a new staff planner at NIPC learning about the rising practice of suburban conservation design and the "culture of water." ULI kindly published this feature length piece called Let It Flow.

This guest essay appeared in Illinois Issues shortly after the consolidation of the two regional agencies in Chicago. I argued that the underlying division remained and that regional planning would not become truly effective until internal unification of the whole agency under its board occurred. My opinion caused something of a stir evoking letters in response. My editor Peggy gave it the prescient title The hitch in the plan.