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.
Nora Beck joined the staff of CNU in December 2005 to lend executive support to John Norquist and assistance to CNU’s planning, policy, and design initiatives. While completing her graduate degree in urban planning at the University of Michigan (MUP...
The Orton Family Foundation has launched Scenarios, a semi-annual e-journal that will focus on “local place.” Each issue will highlight a planning theme or idea related to place. The journal is on the web at www.orton.org/scenarios.
The Centre City Development Corporation of San Diego recently hired Nancy Graham, developer and former mayor of West Palm Beach, Florida, as president and chief operating officer. Graham won acclaim for the revitalization of West Palm Beach she...
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...
By Robert W. Burchell, Anthony Downs, Barbara McCann, and Sahan MukherjiDevelopment Island Press, 2005, 197 pp., paperback $24.95.The newest authoritative study of the costs of sprawl is quite circumspect.
he Neopolis Group LLC won approval in December to build a $325 million town center on approximately 140 acres in Flowood, Mississippi, and the company now is looking to construct a 110-acre traditional neighborhood development (TND) on adjacent land...
A Dec. 9 New York Times article, “Seaside at 25: Troubles in Paradise,” reported that the famous Florida development is trying to repair its eroded beachfront. Some of the protective dunes were washed away, along with the beaches’ white sand, by...
Controversy has been raging along the Gulf Coast over plans by the Mississippi Department of Transportation (MDOT) to build a 128-foot-wide highway bridge between Biloxi and Ocean Springs. Hurricane Katrina knocked the decking off the Highway 90...
And don’t forget: mail or ship your Charter Awards submissions by January 31, 2006. Please make sure that entries sent from overseas locations are scheduled to arrive within one week of the shipping deadline. For full awards details, visit www.cnu....
Building for Life: Designing and Understanding the Human-Nature Connection, a new book by Professor Stephen R. Kellert of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, examines people’s need for elements of nature, whether in cities or in...
Lolly Barnes, who lives in Biloxi and participated in the Mississippi Renewal Forum, will run the Gulf Coast field office of the National Trust for Historic Preservation in partnership with the Mississippi Heritage Trust, working on restoration of...