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.
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...
Three hundred and fifty participants from all over Israel attended the first conference of Merhav, the Movement for Israeli Urbanism (MIU), held on December 12 and 13 in Be’er-Sheva, according to US urbanist Dhiru Thadani of Ayers Saint Gross...
CNU is pleased to welcome two new staff members to its Chicago office. Lee Crandell joined CNU in November 2005 after working part time in 2003 to assist with special projects and Congress planning. As CNU’s membership and chapter coordinator, Lee’s...
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...
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...