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.
El Paso, Texas, approved the SmartCode in late July as an optional alternative to the city’s conventional zoning and subdivision codes. With a population of 609,000, El Paso is believed to be the largest city in the US to have adopted the SmartCode...
A Guide to Impact Fees and Housing Affordability, a new book from Island Press, makes a strong case for basing impact fees on development density and on the square footage of houses. As density goes down and square footage rises, service costs go up...
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...
Since the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991 (ISTEA) helped to put a modicum of balance in federal highway and public transportation funding, planning and transportation advocates have had the opportunity every six years to...
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...
n the mountains of western North Carolina, planning isn’t all that popular. Three of the Tar Heel State’s seven westernmost counties have no subdivision regulations, and when planning is proposed, some longtime residents deride it as “socialism.”...
A large-scale transit-oriented development (TOD) is being planned about 15 miles northwest of Honolulu, Hawaii. The proposed development, called Ho’opili, includes 12,000 units on 1,600 acres in a series of walkable neighborhoods with mixed-use town...
Ward Davis, developer of Ruskin Heights, a TND in Fayetteville, Arkansas, explains why many developers have not rushed to do New Urbanism — despite its profitability and market advantages. “TNDs are more profitable, but they take a whole lot more...
King of Prussia, the Philadelphia region’s largest “edge city,” is getting a walkable downtown, according to Dennis Maloomian, president of Realen. Realen is developing the Village at Valley Forge — which, although alliterative, is something of a...
More “coach houses” will be built along alleys in Vancouver, Canada, beginning next year. More apartments will also be fitted out above garages on the alleys (or “lanes,” as they’re called in Canada). And for the first time, property owners will be...
Since street network connectivity affects all new urbanist projects (and too many good projects are held back by a lack of traditional urban street grids beyond their borders), both individual urbanists and the overall movement will benefit from CNU...