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.
Daniel Parolek, Karen Parolek, and Paul Crawford have identified nine errors that people commonly make when designing and applying form-based codes (FBCs).
By Paul LukezFrom the beginning days of the movement, there was a genuine desire on the part of several of the New Urbanism’s founders and other early members of CNU to bring Modernists and other proponents of the architectural avant-garde into...
Officials in Arlington County, Virginia see a growing likelihood that a modern streetcar system will be installed on a 4.7-mile stretch of the Columbia Pike. The streetcar proposal emerged from planning efforts that produced a form-based code for...
A newly produced 30-minute DVD helps builders and developers in new urban communities learn about cohousing. The DVD features Nevada City Cohousing in Nevada City, California; Eastern Village in Silver Spring, Maryland; and Wild Sage in Boulder,...
Architect Patrick Pinnell, who recently moved his office to Chester, Connecticut, was featured in the “Sketch Pad” column of the April 6 New York Times real estate section. Describing himself in the article as “a card-carrying New Urbanist,” Pinnell...
Rendering and photo shared captions: The series above from A Living Tradition explains an architectural solution to clothes drying — the Laundry Eave. At right is the vernacular-classical Transect.
Photo 1 caption (on page 1): White concrete tile roofs give Alys Beach in Florida a distinctive look. See article on page 10.
Edited by Stephen R. Kellert, Judith H. Heerwagen, and Martin L. MadorJohn Wiley & Sons, 2008, 400 pp., $75 hardcover
Transit-oriented residential development generates far fewer automobile trips than conventional development, according to recent research conducted by PB PlaceMaking, Robert Cervero, the Urban Land Institute, and the Center for Transit-Oriented...
Baldwin Park, a large TND in Orlando, recorded 282 new and existing home sales in 2007, down from 448 sales in 2006, according to a recent report in the Orlando Sentinel. The peak year was 2005, when 524 houses were sold. House values have held up...
Seventeen blocks of Pratt Street in Baltimore would be upgraded into a grand “Avenue of the Inner Harbor” if a design concept produced by Ayers/Saint/Gross in association with the Olin Partnership is carried out. The two firms received a Downtown...
n the 1960s, two elevated Interstate highways were built along the edges of an old, mixed-use area north of downtown San Antonio. The result —no surprise, in retrospect — was that the area pretty much languished for the next 40 years. Now, however,...