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.
More support for the idea that street trees are a civic amenity, not a safety hazard, is offered by the study “Street Trees and Intersection Safety,” by University of California, Berkeley, urban design professor Elizabeth Macdonald. The study notes...
Writer, teacher, and architect Witold Rybczynski is winner of both the 2007 Seaside Prize, to be presented Jan. 27, in Seaside, Florida, and the Vincent Scully Prize, to be awarded Jan. 17 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC....
Leland Speed has stepped down as executive director of the Mississippi Development Authority, a position in which he worked on the redevelopment of communities damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
Donovan Scruggs stepped down as planning director of Ocean Springs, Mississippi, to do planning-related consulting work for Tolar LeBatard Denmark Architects, the firm that produced a development of Katrina Cottages known as Cottage Square. Scruggs...
Table title: Pedestrian Survival Rates — Vehicle Speeds
New urbanists call for changes in ITE guide to “context-sensitive” design.
Richard McLaughlin, a Minneapolis-based architect and town planner known for his work on public-sector charrettes and for his efforts to systematize New Urbanism, died on New Year’s Eve of pancreatic cancer. He was a former principal of the Town...
Firmitas, a subsidiary of the I’On Company, is redeveloping a 32-unit apartment complex in Charlotte into a 1,000-unit, Morningside Village, which will also include 30,000 square feet of commercial space. According to the Charlotte Business Journal...
Brown University is planning to expand into the Jewelry District of Providence, Rhode Island, by purchasing seven buildings containing 232,000 square feet. Past expansion by the university on the city’s East Side often brought Brown into conflict...
In Paris, a motorist with a cellphone or a GPS navigation device will soon be able to find out whether there’s a parking garage nearby that has space available. An organization of French parking garages announced in November that approximately 120...
CNU summit in Boulder showcases Project for Transportation Reform. The nearly 200 transportation enthusiasts who gathered in Boulder November 17-18 witnessed the evolution of CNU’s annual transportation summit into a showcase for the organization...
Mary Vogel, principal of PlanGreen in Washington, DC, helped prepare the Green Building Act of 2006, which the DC Council approved in December. If signed by the mayor and approved by the US Congress, the act would require new District-owned projects...
New urbanists converged on the New Orleans area this fall for four more planning charrettes. One was a follow-up on an earlier charrette in St. Bernard Parish, to design a new town center. The others were part of the Unified New Orleans Plan for...