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.
The University of Miami’s Knight Fellows in Community Building will conduct a charrette in Memphis July 17-22 aimed at helping revitalize a section of the Tennessee city that historically was known as Winchester Park and currently is called Intown....
An economic impact analysis of the Curtis Park HOPE VI project in Denver by the Leland Consulting Group illustrate a success story. Among the findings:• Crime was down 17 percent (it rose 7 percent in comparable neighborhoods).
“New Urbanism is Blooming” is the theme of the Summer 2006 issue of On Common Ground, a magazine published twice
Photo caption #1: A Charter Awards certificate for the creation of new traditional residential villages at Fort Belvoir, Virginia (including the first village: Herryford Village) will be hanging in the Pentagon, said Ivan Bolden, an assistant for...
Steve Mouzon has stepped down from PlaceMakers to devote all his energy to the growth of the New Urban Guild, which focuses on architectural charrettes, “manufactured architecture,” and tools for the making of traditional towns and buildings. One...
For five years public and private interests have sought to redevelop a commercial strip in New Castle County, Delaware, into a walkable village center. These efforts are bearing fruit as a 66-acre medium-density urban center called Brookview nears...
The Grand Valley Metro Council in Grand Rapids, Michigan, won the “best project” award from the Institute of Transportation Engineers Transportation Planning Council for a study that promotes form-based codes among governments in the Grand Rapids...
In downtown Cedar Key, Florida, a development will create a new block of mixed-use buildings plus the restoration of adjacent historic buildings dating to the 1860s. The $25 million project is under construction and expected to be complete in late...
New Town Builders has more than 5,000 traditional neighborhood development (TND) units in the pipeline or under construction in Colorado, including houses in greenfield and grayfield communities, transit-oriented development (TOD), affordable...
Newland Communities LLC has agreed to build a traditional town center in its Clarksburg Town Center development in Montgomery County, Maryland, as part of a settlement that apparently ends a long-running controversy over whether the developer...
The patterns of alley geometry and alley-associated buildings, where they meet the block faces and surrounding streets, may be usefully adjusted in a variety of ways. It is necessary to understand standard configurations, but also how they may be...
A new high-density transit-oriented development in Rockville, Maryland, was compared in The Washington Post to the Piazza Campo dei Fiori in Rome. Rockville Town Square, now under construction, is surrounded by multistory buildings with cafes and...