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.
The first 1,500 acres of a 55,000-acre new urban development was planned near Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April. The developer, SunCal Companies of Irvine, California, is attempting its first traditional neighborhood development, one of the largest...
The NEA has awarded funding to the National Charrette Institute (NCI) for the production and distribution of an educational DVD video on charrettes. The list of matching funders includes the National Association of Realtors. The DVD will contain two...
Highlands Garden Village, a new urban infill development in Denver, Colorado, won the Urban Land Institute’s Award for Excellence: The America Competition. The 27-acre Highlands Garden Village was developed by Perry Rose LLC and was planned by...
Peter Swift, director of town planning for Mid Atlantic Global LLC in Erbil, Iraq, is working on a three-square-mile new town plan for Dohuk in northern Iraq and on infill in the Ankawa Quarter of Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Regional Government...
Pass Christian, one of the Mississippi communities hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, adopted the SmartCode in principle in April. The expectation is that after the city draws maps and meets with residents of neighborhoods to make adjustments, the...
Montgomery, Alabama, approved the SmartCode as mandatory regulation for downtown development. Montgomery County, centered on the city, is a SmartCode hotbed. In 2005, the county’s only other incorporated municipality, Pike Road, approved the...
Joyce Marin decided not to seek a third term on the borough council in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, so that she can devote more time to regional issues, including smart growth. She was recently appointed to the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission and is co-...
Washington Town Center, the first New Jersey town center built from the ground up with the help of grants from the state, including a planning grant from the Office of Smart Growth, is experiencing growing pains.
The 400-acre Town Center, eight...
To overcome persistent conflicts between new urbanists and advocates for the disabled, the lobbying group AARP has agreed to host a conference in which the participants will try to reach a consensus on access requirements for one- to three-unit...
Starting prices at New Daleville have slipped a few thousand dollars further — to $269,990 — in the seven months since Last Harvest was written. “Instead of selling five houses a month, which I had hoped, they’re selling 2 a month,” Joe Duckworth...
Each Congress for the New Urbanism is packed with much of the collective knowledge of an incredible group of people devoted to designing, building, and rebuilding better cities and towns. Many first-time attendees are overwhelmed to be exposed to so...
At HomeTown, a 300-acre new urban development being built by Arcadia Realty in North Richland Hills, Texas, the Walker Creek Elementary School has been designed so that it forms a street wall and helps define an important corner in what will be a...