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.
Rather than see the school board in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, replace the city’s five neighborhood elementary schools with one mega-school containing 1,800 students, Tom Hylton helped launch a campaign that defeated five incumbent school board...
After 13 years as New Mexico’s de facto state planner, Ken Hughes has moved to a new position as clean energy specialist in the state’s Energy Department. “Smart growth is an area I brought over with me, so I continue to keep a handle on the subject...
“The miracle of New Urbanism is its simplicity. [Andres] Duany has designed whole towns under the movement’s principles — like Seaside, Fla., or Kentlands, Md. — and to walk their streets is to be transported back decades, before McMansions and SUVs...
Andres Duany identifies four main target groups and their outlooks.
To produce sustainable buildings and communities, it’s important to know who would like to live in them. Andres Duany identifies four target markets, which differ in outlook and...
Edited by Timothy Mennel, Jo Steffens, and Christopher KlemekMunicipal Art Society and Princeton Architectural Press, 2007, 64 pp., $17.95 paperback
The City of Ithaca, New York, and Cornell University have jointly hired urban planners Goody Clancy of Boston to write design guidelines for Collegetown, a historic mixed-use center adjacent to the university. Code Studio of Austin, Texas, was also...
Ben Starrett at the Funders’ Network says his organization is putting together a funders working group that will focus on climate change, land use, and transportation. “Lots of climate funders are working on various pieces of the carbon emissions...
Lawmakers in Colorado are considering a fee on gas-guzzling vehicles to fund smart growth efforts, according to a December 5 report in The Denver Post. The idea would be to impose a fee estimated at $80 on the purchase of new light trucks and SUVs...
A sense of urgency ran through the Green Architecture and Urbanism Council held in Alexandria, Virginia, and Washington, DC, just after Thanksgiving. Like other councils, this one was an independently organized meeting of peers (many of them CNU...
Mike Watkins, who has headed up the Washington, DC, office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company for 19 years, has enrolled in the inaugeral class of a master’s program with an emphasis on classical design. The program is offered jointly by the...
“It may be useful to think of cities as great carbon-reduction machines,” Armando Carbonell told a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy symposium Nov. 1. Carbonell, chair of the Department of Planning and Urban Form at the Institute, said, “We’ve got to...
Although new urbanists are sometimes criticized for taking a retro approach to architectural style, they have been consistently innovative in their approach to building typology. One example is the hybrid courtyard units in a tightly packed, mixed-...