Lessons from Agueda, Portugal: Does Your Downtown/Town Have a Strong, Memorable Brand Like Agueda?

In 2011 the sleepy small town of Agueda, Portugal, which was off the beaten path of most tourists and struggling economically, had a simple, novel idea that would transform it: Cover one of their main shopping streets with colorful umbrellas. The motto was to “color life, bring color to the gray spaces of the city and make the ones who pass by smile.” 

Over a Decade of Work in Hawai’i

For 18 years, Opticos has demonstrated our commitment to walkable island urbanism.

A New Missing Middle Community Rooted in the Culture of Athens, GA

This unique build-to-rent (BTR) community will offer compact, walkable neighborhoods and a diversity of uses and housing types.

2023 Missing Middle Solutions and Car-Free Urbanism Road Tour

Opticos is hitting the road! Come join Daniel Parolek at one of his upcoming speaking events to discuss all things walkable urbanism-related, including the state of Missing Middle Housing applications around the world, including Opticos’ latest Missing Middle Scans and Deep Dives™, a County-wide Zoning Toolkit for Marin County intended to deliver much-needed housing options, and Housing Plans for various cities including Modesto and Sacramento, California, the latest updates on the implementation of Culdesac Tempe, the county’s first car-free community built from scratch and Prairie Queen, the country’s first 100% Missing Middle Neighborhood which utilizes the Missing Middle Neighborhood Kit™. There will be some frank discussions about existing barriers for implementing walkable urbanism, why we have not made more progress enabling it, and what organizations are leading the way in these conversations.  

Five Years of Successful Projects and Partnership with the City of Memphis, Tennessee

The success of the partnership between Opticos and the City of Memphis demonstrates what is possible when City and community priorities align around a visionary comprehensive plan. For five years, they have worked together on building local capacity and rehabilitating relationships between the City and the community early in the planning process. This laid a strong foundation for later implementation efforts of planning, coding, and design projects, which are quickly showing what it means for Memphis to “build up, not out” in its third century.