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.
Governing named Ventura, California, City Manager Rick Cole one of the magazine’s “public officials of the year,” saying he “has excelled in both elected and appointed roles, promoting innovative mixed-use development that reflects community values...
Table title: Suburban vs. Urban Energy Use
A few places in California have started experimenting with “traffic-reducing housing” — residences that are made available first, or at lower cost, to people who work nearby or who pledge to commute by...
The process the City of Cambridge used to establish a planning framework for substantial development in eastern Cambridge, including the NorthPoint project, makes up a chapter of Douglas Porter’s recent book, Breaking the Development Logjam: New...
A 160-acre, 1,000-unit traditional neighborhood development (TND) was planned in early September for a quarter-section greenfield site in Omaha, Nebraska. The organic nature of the block structure created by planner Placemakers and lead urban...
Habitat for Humanity is seeking to raise its design standards through a collaboration with the Institute for Classical Architecture & Classical America (ICA&CA). Three architects selected by ICA&CA are designing houses in Rochester, New...
Downtown Montgomery will soon have a new plaza much like those in Europe. The Alabama city was about to rebuild an intersection around the 1885-vintage Court Street fountain when Ken Groves, head of the city planning department, asked Rick Hall and...
Berkeley-based planner says New Urbanism should focus more on jobs and regional planning.Peter Calthorpe, whose urban and regional planning work now extends from American locales such as Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, and Austin to overseas cities...
In the September issue, we reported that Dhiru Thadani of Baltimore-based Ayers Saint Gross would lead the planning for a brand-new university in Orissa, a state near the Bay of Bengal in India, and for the 40,000-population township that will be...
A master plan study that Ayers Saint Gross Architects and Planners prepared for hurricane-damaged Long Beach, Mississippi, received an award for excellence in urban design from the Baltimore Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Dhiru...
Joe Duckworth and five partners received entitlement in September to build a new town on 3,000 acres in Morgantown, Pennsylvania, with 12,000 houses and five million square feet of commercial space. Duckworth told New Urban News that the project has...
Virginia Governor Timothy M. Keane decided in September that the state will request federal support for construction of an elevated Metro rail line through Tysons Corner rather than push for a four-mile rail tunnel through the Virginia “edge city.”...
The City of Moss Point, Mississippi, one of the coastal communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina, is moving forward with a plan that includes adoption of the SmartCode, according to press reports. Steve Renfroe, chairman of the Moss Point...