Urbanism

Urbanism is about the city as a whole: housing, streets, parks, transit and the rules that decide what can be built where. The Journal's urban design stories look past the individual building to the systems around it — how a neighbourhood grows denser without losing its character, how a public plaza earns its crowd, how a zoning change becomes a new type of home.

Housing is at the centre. We explain the ideas shaping cities now, such as missing middle housing — the duplexes, courtyard buildings and bungalow courts that once filled American neighbourhoods and were later zoned out of most of them — and we follow the laws trying to bring them back. In California that means SB 9 and SB 79; in Los Angeles, a long argument about where new homes should go. Each explainer says what a law actually allows, where it applies and what it has produced so far.

Because the Journal is written in Los Angeles, the city is our laboratory: its bungalow courts and dingbats, its boulevards and transit corridors, its civic spaces and the institutions reshaping them. But the questions are universal, and the section covers projects from any city testing better ways to live together.

We prefer evidence to slogans: permit numbers, research and built examples. Every explainer defines its terms, shows real examples and links to the planning documents, research and reporting behind it. Where a topic connects to a project in the portfolio — such as the Missing Middle studio project — the stories link to it. Start with the urban design explainers and stories below.