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 head of the District of Columbia Council has introduced a bill to allow developers to build housing, offices, and shops alongside or on top of new schools, libraries, and other public facilities. Chairman Linda W. Cropp sees this as a way to get...
The Urban Land Institute, which helped establish regional smart growth alliances in the Philadelphia and Washington, DC, metropolitan areas (see Sept. 2005 New Urban News), is expanding its initiative to six other regions. Since starting the...
Organizers of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) program hope to start the initiative by operating a small-scale test of it this fall. For about two years, the Congress for the New Urbanism has been...
Austin, Texas, this winter established its first “parking benefit district,” which will regulate parking demand in the West Campus area, where the city intends to increase residential density.
The world’s most populous nation is planning to accommodate a massive influx of urban dwellers in multi-modal, high-density developments.
Chael, Cooper & Associates of Coral Gables, Florida, which operates in association with Dover, Kohl & Partners Town Planning, won a Palladio Award for the Marshall and Vera Lea Rinker Building and McKean Gateway at Rollins College, which...
Providence, Rhode Island, is not the kind of place that leaves its urban plans on the drawing boards. In the past 20 years, city leaders have freed the city’s riverfront from a concrete tomb, moved rail lines to the edge of downtown, and started...
Lerner Enterprises has thrown a wrench into plans by Fairfax County to add hundreds of small condominium units to part of Tysons Corner, a northern Virginia business center where 100,0000 people work but where only about 17,000 reside.
As part of...
Washington, DC, Mayor Anthony Williams last year announced a “Great Streets” program that would spend $100 million of local funds on streetscape and infrastructure improvements, land-use planning, and development assistance in the capital city. In...
The fifth annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Denver at the end of January drew the largest crowd ever for this event by a considerable margin, according to Michele Kelso Warren of the Local Government Commission (LGC) in Sacramento,...
The Avenue District and the redevelopment of the Flats may produce housing at opposite ends of downtown.
Critics of smart growth and New Urbanism love to point out that sprawl is not limited to the US or North America; it occurs across the globe. The implication is that all the world, or at least the portion that can afford it, likes living and working...