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 Urban Land Institute has released a 22-page booklet titled “Principles for Temporary Communities,” based on lessons learned from the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005. It includes a new strategy from FEMA’s Joint Housing Solutions Center that calls...
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...
A citizens’ effort in the Takoma neighborhood of Washington, DC, and adjacent Takoma Park, Maryland, highlights what may become an issue at a number of transit stations across the nation: how to balance development against the need for affordability...
A 15-member Charrette Stewardship Group, chaired by Pam Kramer of the Duluth Local Initiatives Support Corp. (LISC), is working on promoting and implementing ideas from a charrette the University of Miami’s Knight Program in Community Building...
The first project advocated by the Delaware Valley Smart Growth Alliance within the state of Delaware is Bell Point, a 108-acre mixed-use new urban community at the Five Points intersection of State Routes 1 and 9 in Sussex County.
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...
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...