Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) has gained momentum in recent years and has been widely adopted by planners, architects, and security professionals for the design of buildings, sites, parks, and urban renewal projects. The CPTED model emphasizes designs that encourage positive...

Planners support architects by quantifying the court’s space needs in a way that justifies the architectural conclusions. While it may be tempting to involve planners in the early phases of a courthouse project and then “pass the torch” to architects during the programming and design phases,...

As mass shootings – and school shootings in particular – have become commonplace across our nation, the need to improve security in our schools has perhaps never been so urgent. Many school boards and administrators want to improve school security but do not have adequate budgets to implement...

In 2015, a former colleague of mine wrote a blog about the importance of courthouses to the vibrancy of the surrounding areas in which they are located. As he stated, courthouses have long played an important role as a generator of economic activity for the downtowns of larger cities and smaller...

I recently read about an interesting trend that has gained steam in the U.S. during the COVID pandemic - the rise of “Zoom towns.” The term is a take on “boom towns” – those population centers that sprung up as a result of the new economic opportunities brought about by the Industrial Revolution....