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.
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...
Allan Greenberg will receive the fourth annual Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture from the University of Notre Dame School of Architecture. Greenberg, who has architectural offices in Washington, DC, New York City, and Greenwich,...
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...
In one of the largest transit-oriented developments in Maryland’s Montgomery County in years, the county has approved a plan that would transform an industrial zone around the Shady Grove Metro station into an urban center with office buildings,...
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...
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...
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...
When urban planning programs
were formed in universities in the 1940s and 1950s, they originally taught students to draw, says Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of architecture at Georgia Tech and a student of the history of urbanism in academia....
Form-based codes suddenly seem to be popping up ev-
erywhere. Two of the latest communities moving toward implementing them are a fast-growing suburb in Texas and a distressed industrial city in Ohio — municipalities that are almost polar...