Archives
Welcome to the archives of Better Cities & Towns, a publication founded by Robert Steuteville as New Urban News in 1996. This archive holds two decades of the best news and analysis on compact, mixed-use growth and development, from 1996 to 2015.
The Financial Times reported July 18 on a sure sign that sprawl is on the defensive, at least for now: Some developers are selling outlying land back to agricultural interests, having concluded that the market for constructing houses on it has...
Designs of three LEED-ND projects in Beijing feature green technology, but the rating system doesn’t guarantee good urban design.The Beijing Olympic Village, containing 22 six-story buildings and 20 nine-story buildings on 160 acres, won a Gold...
“Hybrid Coding” is explored in the May issue of the American Planning Association’s periodical Zoning Practice. Author Arista Strungys, a planner at Camiros Ltd., writes that replacing a conventional zoning code with a form-based code may be too...
Only 3 percent of home buyers expressed a willingness to give up proximity to public transportation in today’s market, according to a recent poll by Builder magazine. More buyers (6 percent) are willing to give up proximity to shopping and/or work....
Photo caption 1: DPZ Town Planning Director Gahlina Tahchieva leads an open-source session on suburban retrofits at CNU XVI.
Emily Talen won this year’s award for best article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, for her analysis, “New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding in Mississippi.” Talen, a planning professor at...
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(All graphs are: (Residential land value per SF x Density (Units per Acre)
Studies of transit-oriented development show that rising materials...
The Hercules, California, City Council approved a new urbanist conceptual plan July 22 that calls for construction of 1,224 housing units, 42,000 sq. ft. of retail, 81,000 sq. ft. of offices, and 134,000 sq. ft. of flex space on 42 acres of the city...
On August 21 NPR reported on a steel mill that is being converted to a town center at the interestion of state routes 29 and 202 in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The 100-acre Uptown Worthington, now under construction, is planned to include 745,000 square...
Ocean Springs development runs counter to a spate of bad development in Mississippi.Cottage Square, a model cluster of new urbanist cottages that was planned more than two years ago for Ocean Springs, Mississippi, as a response to Hurricane Katrina...
Five years after it was published in the US by W.W. Norton, the well-received Urban Design Handbook: Techniques and Working Methods by Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh has been translated into Chinese and will soon make its debut in the world’s...
High gas prices are resulting in an important health benefit — the plummeting of US automobile fatalities. The Associated Press reports a 9 percent drop in motor vehicle deaths overall through May of 2008 compared with the first five months of 2007...