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.
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...
Looney Ricks Kiss Architects has opened an office in Jacksonville, Florida. See lrk.com for details.
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...