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...
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 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...
Canada Lands Company (CLC), a corporation that redevelops surplus military bases across Canada, has received the go-ahead to build or refurbish 3,200 housing units at the 200-acre Currie Barracks in Calgary, Alberta. At 16 units per acre, the...
For the past several years, new urbanist developments — mostly small — have been popping up in the towns of northwest Michigan. Now new urbanist ideas are about to be considered across an entire six-county region, through a two-year “visioning”...
Construction is expected to start this spring on a project to install four modern roundabouts, each with a sculpture in its center, on Routes 62 and 391 in Hamburg, New York, south of Buffalo. The village, the state Department of Transportation, and...
The developer of the Midwest’s biggest and most successful traditional neighborhood development (TND), New Town at St. Charles, has planned an equally ambitious TND in the Kansas City area. Whittaker Builders’ New Town at Liberty will eventually...
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has purchased land around the chain’s Pass Christian, Mississipi, store, which was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. The purchase has stirred hopes that the company will build a “Wal-Mart village,” as had been proposed by local...