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.
Fairfax County, Virginia, has issued a request for proposals for redesigning one of the nation’s most famous, or notorious, edge cities — Tysons Corner. The consultant selected by the county would help a business-civic group known as the Tysons Task...
Brent Toderian, who has worked with new urbanist projects as a planner for the City of Calgary, has moved to Vancouver to take the Director of Planning position. As the Vancouver Globe and Mail reports, he will be taking over from the city’s “...
Doris Goldstein thinks the time has come for new urbanists to consider forming a national organization that “would educate communities about new urbanist principles, provide support and information about community governance, and offer cultural...
Plan title: Parking Lot Guidelines
“Planners cannot significantly improve the design of cities without reforming local parking requirements to emphasize quality over quantity,” Vinit Mukhija and Donald Shoup declare in the Summer 2006 issue of...
By the National Charrette Institute, principal authors Bill Lennertz and Aarin LutzenhiserAmerican Planning Association, 2006, 208 pp., paperback $39.95.For the last two decades at least, new urbanists have been conducting charrettes to create...
“Agriculture is the new golf,” observes Andres Duany.An organic farm has been created at New Town at St. Charles, Missouri, a large traditional neighborhood development outside St. Louis. Developer Whittaker Builders is conducting a nationwide...
Towne Center at Haddon is the first project in New Jersey to win recognition from the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance as a smart-growth undertaking. Fieldstone Associates of Doylestown, Pennsylvania, is proposing to develop 25,000 square feet...
Public officials in Miramar, Florida, recently approved the privately developed portion of the city’s town center. The suburban city bought the 54-acre site for $7.8 million, according to assistant city manager Wazir Ishmael, and hired Torti Gallas...
Alameda, County, California, which encompasses most of East San Francisco Bay, including Oakland, has adopted a “pedestrian master plan” aimed at making streets and sidewalks in unincorporated areas of the 1,444,000-population county safer and more...
Jean-Maurice Moulene has left Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists to become vice president for development at Concert Realty Partners LLC in Los Angeles. He will use his experience in architecture and development to expand Concert’s...
Every component of urbanism possesses both technical and social dimensions. While there are always good reasons for a traditional component or relationship of components to assume a standard form, there are also times when some widespread alteration...
A groundbreaking was held in May for the $350 million Pleasant Hill BART transit village in Contra Costa County, California. Lennertz Coyle & Associates (now HDR Town Planning of San Francisco, California) designed the project nearly five years...