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.
Maurice Cox, an architecture professor at the University of Virginia, is the new director of design of the National Endowment for the Arts. He will supervise panel selection and the grant-making process in design and oversee the Mayors’ Institute on...
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...
Seth Brown, co-founder of a quarterly magazine called The Next American City, has launched Aspen Equities LLC, a real estate investment and development company focusing on environmentally sustainable projects in greater New York. The firm’s first...
“Complete Streets” movement presses a growing number of cities to plan for multimodal transportation.In 2003, bicyclists intent on obtaining safer routes for cycling concluded that they needed a slogan — one that would communicate their goal to the...
A US group devoted to traditional architecture and urbanism made its debut at the Traditional Building Show in New Orleans this October. The new organization — the American affiliate of the International Network for Traditional Building,...
Landmark buildings can more than pay for themselves through weddings and other functions.Landmark buildings can more than pay for themselves through weddings and other functions.