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 US Environmental Protection Agency has released four new smart growth publications: “Protecting Water Resources with Higher-Density Development,” “Using Smart Growth Techniques as Stormwater Best Management Practices,” “Growing Toward More...
Several South Mississippi communities that took the brunt of Hurricane Katrina are considering changing their development codes and adopting other recommendations from last October’s Mississippi Renewal Forum.
Combining apartments, retail space, for-sale townhomes, and a public plaza, West River Commons, which opened in 2004, replaced blighted uses on a polluted Minneapolis site. The project provides the Twin Cities with an example of appropriate infill...
The last two decades have witnessed a heartening revival of traditional planning techniques. Element after element, the components of walkable, mixed-use, civically conscious environments have been restudied, redeployed into use, and gradually have...
The Mississippi Renewal Forum, which was assembled in October by the Congress for the New Urbanism, won an Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America in the...
FrogSong, a 30-household cohousing development that was featured in a June 2005 New Urban News report on cohousing in new urban neighborhoods, won an EnergyValue Housing Award from the National Association of Home Builders. The 2.3-acre, mixed-use...
BB&T Corporation, a financial services company based in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, announced in late January that it will no longer lend to commercial developers that plan to build condominiums, shopping malls, and other private projects on...
Jason Miller, a writer and editor who moved last year from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Concrete, Washington, has been named editor of New Towns, a new urbanist periodical published by Diane Dorney in Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland. “In the near...
The SmartCode & Manual, which is having such a significant impact on redevelopment of the Gulf Coast, is now in hard copy print for the first time — published by New Urban Publications, publisher of New Urban News.
The SmartCode & Manual is...
The Katrina Cottage, a 308 sq. ft. prototype dwelling designed by Marianne Cusato of New York, has received rave reviews since being displayed in mid-January at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando.
Adelegation of new urbanists and Mississippians returned from Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, in mid-January with a promise that the discount retailer would participate in a charrette writing a SmartCode plan for a section of Pass...
Automobile trips generated by high-density, infill developments served by transit may be up to 90 percent lower than industry standards would suggest, according to experts at Nelson/Nygaard in San Francisco. Nelson/Nygaard developed software that...