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.
Howard Katz, a former Knight Fellow in Community Building who worked for the Cuyahoga County treasurer’s office in Cleveland and the American Architectural Foundation in Washington, DC, will be a member of the “founding faculty” of the Charlotte...
Kenneth Hitchens was identified as being “of the Baldwin Park development” in the April 2006 article “New charrette system may bring more production builders into TNDs.” Hitchens, an independent architect, is a resident of Baldwin Park in Orlando,...
The Katrina Cottage is one of the most versatile ideas that have come out of the new urbanist Gulf Coast charrettes.
The development of housing and shops at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia reveals some of the differences between how New Urbanism operates in a civilian setting and how it works on military bases. Herryford Village, the first completed portion of a...
After many years on the drawing boards and in permitting, Haymount in Caroline County, Virginia, is preparing for rapid development, according to developer John Clark. The first building, a wastewater treatment plant designed by Washington, DC,...
Laguna West, an early 1990s new urbanist development 12 miles south of downtown Sacramento, recently became a point of contention in the June 6 primary for governor of California. State Treasurer Philip Angelides, now running for the Democratic...
PlaceMatters, an initiative of the Orton Family Foundation, has established a website at www.placematters.org. PlaceMatters is a network of practitioners involved in what the Foundation calls “the art and science of planning for vibrant and...
As of mid-May new urbanist planner and traffic engineer Peter Swift was recovering in Frankfurt, Germany, after suffering a heart attack in Kurdish Iraq, where he went to work last year to help plan the region’s recovery. Swift, who was flown to...
John Chamberlain, a Harvard MBA with a real estate specialty based in Okeechobee, Florida, launched a firm called Urban Technics (www.urban-technics.net) that specializes in financial feasibility of new urban projects. Chamberlain, who participated...
Three months in advance of anticipated initial home settlements, a factory is built in the area planned as the final phase of the subdivision. The home assembly plant is typically sized for volume of output, recognizing that some capacity increase...
Lacking a city-initiated redevelopment plan, the Gentilly section of New Orleans took its future into its own hands in late April and sponsored a charrette led by Miami architect-planner Andres Duany. The well-attended eight-day program produced a...