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 image to the right accompanied a March book review of Australian New Urbanism, and originally appeared in that book. Contrary to the caption in March, the authors never said the approach at the left is the “Australian ideal,” although it is well...
Jeff Speck will step down in May as director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts and return to private practice as a city planner. “I signed up for two years and ended up staying for four,” Speck said, expressing satisfaction with...
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 Vancouver City Council unanimously adopted the East Fraserlands Official Development Plan, a high-density town center and a major new development site with emphasis on sustainability and New Urbanism. Hired by ParkLane Homes and WesGroup, Duany...
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...
Rockville Town Square, a 12.5-acre development that has been designed to become the centerpiece of Rockville, Maryland, welcomed its first residents in February. Developer RD Rockville LLC has constructed 644 one-, two-, and three-bedroom units,...
Report suggests policies that would make it more expensive for households to add extra vehicles. Many people in metropolitan Atlanta would like to live in walkable neighborhoods, but not enough such neighborhoods are being built, says a...
To meet a pressing need for inexpensive classroom space, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools system in North Carolina is going to experiment with a schoolhouse prototype based on Katrina Cottages. A group at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, led by...
Morningside Village in Charlotte is the redevelopment of a 32-acre apartment complex — not a 32-unit complex as reported in January on page 17. The transit-oriented site near downtown is being developed by Firmitas, a subsidiary of the I’On Group.
A seven-day charrette aimed at planning a new downtown district for Sunland Park, New Mexico, has been tentatively scheduled for the week of March 5th by Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists, which won a contract from the 14,250-person...