Cook County led the way in planning 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.  

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. I was a new staff planner at NIPC learning about the rising practice of suburban conservation design. I became fascinated with the concept of the “culture of water,” as friend and planner Jim Patchett puts it. ULI kindly published a feature length piece.

I was a young staff planner at NIPC working on the regional plan when, in winter 2003, I went up to McHenry County and asked the Farm Bureau to put a public meeting together to talk about farmland. We assembled a large group for that meeting, which occurred on a really cold night in early February. The Bureau helped me bring out some farmers, while some real estate people also showed up apparently to defend their interests. A farmer there of long standing in the county, I can't recall his name, expressed a sense of care for the land, although...