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.
With a focus on traditional urbanism and the lessons of our most treasured older cities, the formal Thursday-evening-through-Sunday CNU XV program is fully loaded with expert urbanists sharing valuable knowledge, but there are great reasons to...
The new director of planning for the District of Columbia is well known to new urbanists — Harriet Tregoning is the former secretary of the Maryland Office of Smart Growth and director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute. She was on the team...
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...
Edited by Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006, 387 pp., paperbound $34.95.
The 2007 Downtown Specific Plan of Ventura, California, which calls for reconnecting the downtown to the beach and for managing parking better, won approval March 19 from the City Council. Five years in the making, the plan calls for adding more...
Since compiling a list of urban investment funds and publishing it in the March issue, New Urban News has learned of three more sources that invest part or all of their money in developments classified as smart growth, new urbanist, or...
The new CNU tradition of presenting Athena Awards to pioneers who have laid the foundation for New Urbanism will continue at CNU XV in Philadelphia with cast-bronze medals going to Robert A.M. Stern, Denise Scott Brown, and Jonathan Barnett. The...
The 2007 Charter Award winners, listed in the table below and to be presented at CNU in Philadelphia in May, include four designs promoting Gulf-Coast recovery. They include:• Two projects that advance the promise of modest Katrina Cottages in...
“It’s wonderful to see kids in the town center,” town landscape architect Rip Weaver says of the Mt Laurel development in Shelby County, Alabama. Schoolchildren and their parents are among those breathing life into center’s several blocks, which...
The City of New Orleans is poised to invest at least $1.2 billion in reconstruction, possibly beginning as early as this April, recovery chief Edward Blakely announced March 23. “By September, we want to see cranes on the skyline,” Blakely said. The...
The City of Livermore, California approved Livermore Village, a 5.5-acre mixed-use catalyst project in their downtown. Opticos Design designed the plan and architecture in association with Thomas Dolan Architecture for Anderson Pacific, LLC.
The...
A number of recent books have come out that are of interest to new urbanists, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, published by ISI Books and authored by Philip Bess, professor and director of graduate...