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.
CNU’s Urban Laboratory sessions were a successful introduction of the Providence Congress. Giving participants an opportunity to work side-by-side with expert new urbanists on local challenges such as customizing a form-based code to the local...
Steve Maun of Leyland Alliance LLC and Andres Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company led a week-long charrette in early February that produced a design for 30 acres of waterfront land in Newburgh, New York, a distressed Hudson River city of 28,...
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...
Dan Burden, after helping hundreds of communities make their streets and public spaces comfortable for pedestrians, has been trying recently to help the editors of Prevention magazine understand what makes a place genuinely good for walking. Each...
With a February 13 vote by City Council, Gulfport became the first Mississippi city on the Gulf of Mexico to adopt the SmartCode. The Council approved it 6-0 as a parallel code over the entire city of 71,000. In a separate action, the Council voted...
Kansas City-based 180 Degrees Design Studio is collaborating with PlanningWorks of Leawood, Kansas, to produce planning and design guidelines for rebuilding in Mandeville, Louisiana. The project includes a combination of form-based coding and...
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”...