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.
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...
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,...
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...
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...