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.
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...
Daniel Cary, who went from ecologist in the Everglades to new urbanist planner in West Palm Beach, Florida, and elsewhere, received the Seaside Prize Oct. 14 at a ceremony in Seaside, Florida.
Milton Grenfell, principal in Grenfell Architecture, has moved his practice from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Washington, DC. Grenfell is known for his advocacy of Classicism and criticism of Modernism.
An estimated 200,000 evacuees from New Orleans settled in the Baton Rouge area in late August, straining the resources of the principal local government — the consolidated City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton Rouge, which had a population of...
Hopes that the Civano development in southeast Tucson might continue to develop along new urban principles have now been pretty much extinguished. Pulte Homes, which took over the “environmentally sustainable” Arizona project from Fannie Mae, is...
Tim Keane, an architect and former director of planning for Charleston, South Carolina, and Davidson, North Carolina, has created an urban design and development firm called Keane & Company, based in Charleston. Keane hired Jacob Lindsey, a...
By Charles Jencks Rizzoli, 2005, 224 pp., hardcover $35. New Urbanism has yet to produce its equivalent of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: a building so astonishing that it generates excitement worldwide.