To readers who follow the idiosyncracies of the political journalism world, the most notable feature of the The New Republic’s revamped Web site may be the fact that that publication has finally find a way to recover its long-lost online archives (well, the last decade of them, anyway). But there’s another interesting wrinkle to the site—a new blog on metro issues, such as housing and land use, transportation and traffic, or systems of governance. Titled “The Avenue,” the blog is produced in collaboration with the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.

Readers familiar with Brookings’s work on America’s transformation into a “metro nation” may not encounter new ideas here, but the blog should be a welcome addition to the expanding online discussion of these issues (which has, recently, produced some sharp disagreement). With any luck, it will also attract the eyeballs of a few people who aren’t already attuned to “urbanist” issues, and help to highlight the enormous influence that policy decisions in this field have on the way we live our lives.