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.
Infill and redevelopment projects designed by new urbanists took most of the US EPA’s National Awards for Smart Growth achievement in 2005. The winner for overall excellence was the Denver Urban Renewal Authority for facilitating the redevelopment...
Las Cruces, New Mexico, has adopted a master plan that calls for restoring two-way traffic to Main Street, where business withered after six blocks were converted to a pedestrian mall in the 1970s. The New York Times reported October 12 that the 80,...
Michael Mehaffy is involved in launching a research center on “generative coding” with Christopher Alexander, in association with the Martin Centre at Cambridge University in England. Mehaffy will serve as managing director of the Centre for...
The Cornerstone town center project, which was intended to reinvigorate part of a blighted commercial strip in Parma Heights, Ohio, will likely be stripped of every aspect of New Urbanism. The McGill Property Group of Solon, Ohio, has offered to buy...
During the Mississippi Renewal Forum, retail specialist Robert Gibbs, architect Victor Dover, urban designer Laura Hall, and CNU President John Norquist all tried to persuade Wal-Mart to make the retailer’s next store in Pass Christian, Mississippi...
Students, retailers, and office tenants have begun moving into a $130 million mixed-use project known as South Campus Gateway, on High Street next to the Ohio State University campus in Columbus.
St. Lucie County Commissioners approved the North County Charrette Plan, which applies traditional neighborhood design to a 28-square-mile area (see the September 2005 issue for more details). After a 3-2 vote in October, commissioners sent the plan...
Charlotte, North Carolina, is in the process of adopting connectivity requirements, including deciding how long the city’s blocks can be. The government is “getting tremendous pressure from the development community on the block dimension issues,”...
Geoffrey Anderson, director of the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth Office, and Harriet Tregoning, executive director of the Smart Growth Leadership Institute, spent their honeymoon in Biloxi, Mississippi, both of them working in...
Designs from less than 300 square feet on up aim to reinforce South Mississippi’s character.
The Gulf Coast of Mississippi needs to gird itself against a flood of mass-produced houses that have little in common with the homes built in the region...
By Jonathan Levine RFF Press, 2005, 223 pp., paperback $26.95Many new urbanists agree that the primary barrier to developing more compact, mixed-use, transit-oriented communities is zoning. Yet new urbanists face an uphill battle to change codes —...
Prince Charles accepted the National Building Museum’s Vincent Scully Prize Nov. 3 in Washington, DC, where he declared his admiration for “traditional urbanism.” Scully, the longtime Yale professor and architectural historian, presented the award...