Mike Lydon is a writer, activist and urban planner with a specialty in alternative transportation and the public realm. His work has appeared in or been featured by CNN Headline News, Planetizen, the Miami Herald, The Village Voice, The Hartford Courant, The Tennessean, The Miami New Times, Model D, Streetsblog and the Lincoln County News. He received his B.A. in American Cultural Studies from Bates College and a Masters in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, where he won a national competition for his Detroit-based Transit-Oriented Development thesis research. He is a co-author of the forthcoming Smart Growth Manual with Andres Duany and Jeff Speck, to be published in the fall of 2009.

Before joining Duany Plater-Zyberk and Company in 2007, Mike worked with the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, and Ann Arbor’s GetDowntown Program. While living in Boston in 2004 he volunteered with Northeastern University’s Center for Urban and Regional Policy (CURP) and was a founding member of the New England Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which awarded him the Volunteer of the Year Award in 2005.

Mike is currently a member of the Mayor’s Miami’s Bicycle Advisory Committee. He encourages you to trade four wheels for two.