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.
Christopher Gray, who has been writing the “Streetscapes” feature in the Sunday New York Times real estate section for years, authored an Oct. 23 article debating whether Manhattan’s 1811 grid, which covers most of the island, has turned out to be...
Leo Casas of Opticos Design has been hired by Seaside town founder Robert Davis to fill the position of the town architect. “This position had been vacant for several years and Robert Davis has reinstituted this position because he realized that the...
The Louisiana Recovery Authority is
hiring experienced new urbanist firms to help the state, where an estimated 205,000 homes were destroyed in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and their aftermath.
New Urban News turns 10 and reviews how the movement has advanced.
Ten years ago this spring, the first issue of New Urban News
appeared. To mark the anniversary, we decided to reread the decade’s worth of newsletters and see what they reveal...
By Robert BruegmannUniversity of Chicago Press, 2005, 301 pp., hardcover $27.50.
New statistics on commuting suggest that residents of metropolitan Atlanta are shifting toward living closer to work and increasingly toward finding homes in Atlanta itself. From 1998 to 2003 the average distance each person drives per day plummeted...
Sherman Plaza, a $190 million mixed-use project, is the latest development rising in downtown Evanston, Illinois, which has become an ever-livelier center in the past 10 years. Nearly all of the 253 residential units have been sold; construction is...
Madison, Wisconsin, appears to be on the verge of adopting a comprehensive plan that reverses the trend toward sprawl and instead encourages denser development. Some future projects would fill parking lots or replace single-story shopping centers....
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....