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.
New rules have been adopted in Montgomery County, Maryland that could steer development into areas that are already urbanizing. The rules allow planners for the first time to consider public transportation when deciding where to permit development....
“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-...
Samuel Sherman Jr., cochair of the CNU XV local host committee, and a former suburban housing developer who has become a major force in Philadelphia’s development community since adopting New Urbanism as a guiding philosophy, joined the CNU Board in...
The Smart Growth Leadership Institute has released a toolkit to “help communities untangle the thicket of policies and procedures that get in the way of implementing smart growth strategies and sustainable urban development.” The tools were put...
Taubman Centers is not the only large mall owner to try to squelch plans for construction of a pedestrian-scale mixed-use center near one of its existing regional malls. A jury decided last month that General Growth Properties (GGP) must pay $74.2...
Conflicts continue to arise between privately owned town centers and people who think the centers should uphold all the freedoms the US Constitution guarantees in the public domain. In June a security guard at a large Maryland development known as “...
Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, editorsNorton Books, 2007, 336 pp., hardcover $50.Jane Jacobs having died in April 2006, it verged on perverseness when her great nemesis, planner Robert Moses, this year became the star of three New York...
Two proposed mixed-use developments in eastern Pennsylvania — the 210-acre Ellis Preserve Town Center in Newtown Square and the 418-acre Mountain Manor project in Smithfield Township, Monroe County — have won recognition from the Delaware Valley...
Pennsylvania municipalities are becoming increasingly receptive to New Urbanism, Tom Comitta says in a profile of his town planning and landscape architecture firm that was published in the August issue of Landscape Architecture. In 2002,...
The Orton Family foundation has released the Big Box Evaluator, a free tool “designed to help communities and individuals learn about the impacts of big-box stores.” People in communities that want to evaluate proposed big-box developments can...
Peter Swift returned to Longmont, Colorado, after nearly two years of working on planning and development in the Kurdish region of Iraq. He has reactivated his town planning, traffic, and civil engineering firm, Swift and Associates. He has recently...