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 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...
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,...
Mississippi will get the lion’s share of housing designed by new urbanists; Louisiana complains.The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced in late December that it will give Louisiana $75 million and Mississippi more than $280 million for...
In the 1990s when Andres Duany made double carousel slide presentations, he used to feature a slide of the Intersection of Virginia Beach and Independence boulevards in Virginia Beach. The suburban intersection boggled the mind with 20 or more lanes...
The Driehaus Form-Based Codes Award will be presented for the first time in May at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Philadelphia. Submissions must be received by the Form-Based Codes Institute by February 28. The jury will consist of architect...
Luxury condominium developers in New York are including automatic parking garages in their projects. The driver leaves a car in a delivery bay, and a computerized system carries the vehicle to a parking spot in a structure that — thanks to the...
Ground has been broken on the fourth and final phase of Excelsior & Grand, a mixed-use town center that has given the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park a new gathering place adjacent to a municipal park. The last segment of the project, being...
Six years after debuting a website that was advanced for its time, CNU has rebuilt and relaunched CNU.org to help members learn about New Urbanism, share knowledge, and stay connected. The site is designed to communicate more effectively — and more...
Michael Crosbie, the new chair of the architecture department at the University of Hartford, is adding a course on New Urbanism to the school’s curriculum. Crosbie, an architect, writer, and editor who has worked for the past 11 years at Steven...
In Cherokee County, Georgia, a 4,000-acre development is generating controversy as it winds it way through a rezoning process. The Willoughby-Sewell tract, to be developed by Stephen Macauley and being planned by EDAW, is a conservation-oriented...