Urbanism is about creating great places for people to live, work, and play. Urbanism is a collection of principles of improving city life that combine to create cities that are made for people.

Some core ideas of urbanism include rapid transit, historic preservation, diversity, creativity, green spaces, walkable cities, inspiring, public spaces, urban economic development, and high density neighborhoods with mixed use buildings.

For our country to be great, our cities must be great. For far too long, our governmental policies have worked against cities. For many years, mortgage redlining policy favored suburbs and made it almost impossible to get a mortgage in many cities. To build the Interstate highway system, millions of city homes were destroyed and neighborhoods were tore apart. In Detroit alone, over 100,000 homes were destroyed. Sound walls were not initially put up around the freeways, so noise permeated many of the homes near the newly built freeways. These are but a couple of examples of the artificial obstacles that led to the struggles of so many cities.

Cities can be strong again. Cities have overcome many of these obstacles, but much can be done to make our cities even stronger.

More than the buildings, more than the businesses, more than the street names or the parks, a city is people. That is the difference between a city and anywhere else; a city has more people.  The buildings are there because of the people. The businesses are there to serve the people.

The people of a city are its lifeblood. This is not some Pollyanna talk like many companies that say, "Our people are our greatest asset," and then treat them poorly. A city is its people.

Urbanism does not claim that living in a city is superior to living in suburb or living in the country. Urbanism does claim that living in a city can be great and promotes making decisions that effect our cities to make cities better for their people.