A Placemaking Journal

If you’ve been following our work here, you know we have a soft spot for Katrina Cottages and the neighborhood design movement they inspired. And you also know some of us — okay, me — have been grumpy about the way Tiny House talk has sucked oxygen out of the discussion of small scale homes in small scale neighborhoods. So it was great to see last week’s “Public Square” Q&A with two of the design pioneers behind Katrina Cottages, Marianne Cusato and Bruce Tolar.

“Public Square” is Rob Steuteville’s blog on the Congress for the New Urbanism website. It’s an appropriate place to find this catch-up KC piece. Rob and about 100 other CNU members were there at the beginning of the Katrina Cottage effort during the 2005 post-Katrina mega-charrette in Biloxi called the Mississippi Renewal Forum.

In his interview, Rob teased out all the important background of the KC design effort and its connections with other CNU initiatives like Lean Urbanism, Missing Middle Housing and Small Scale Developers and Builders movements.

This week, our PlaceMakers partners and colleagues are on charrette in New Mexico. And in our absence, we can’t think of a better use of our blog space than to direct readers to Rob’s interview with Marianne and Bruce. So please be our guest. Right here.

–Ben Brown

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