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.
Aspecial Walgreens design for the village of Poland, Ohio, has stirred interest in northeast Ohio and beyond. Walgreens recently opened a 14,000 sq. ft. store that stands just 20 feet back from Poland’s main east-west road, and draws from the...
Carothers Crossing called “precedent-setting project” for the Nashville area.
Nashville Metro Council has approved the city’s largest traditional neighborhood development (TND) to date, the 603-acre, 2,300-unit Carothers Crossing, to be developed...
Michael Leccese, CNU member and principal of Fountainhead Communications, is the new director of ULI Colorado, a local district council of the Urban Land Institute. The job is part time, so Leccese will still be working at Fountainhead with his wife...
Frontage is the general term for what happens in the space
between private buildings and public streets. The frontage includes all building and landscape elements forming the pedestrian experience. As explained in the previous installment of the...
“Lessons From Katrina: What A Major Disaster Can Teach Transportation Planners” is a new paper from Todd Litman, director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute in Victoria, British Columbia. “From a transport planning perspective, the greatest...
By Mary Lynch
The first national standards for green
neighborhoods moved one step closer to completion this fall — and one step closer to becoming a force in the blossoming green segment of the development market — with the release for public...
San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood, which has been bouncing back from years of decay (see Sept. 2005 New Urban News), was featured in the New York Times travel section Sept. 11. The newspaper reported that demolition of freeway ramps “cleared...
Two municipalities are showing how communities can restrict “formula retail” businesses that some contend undermine the character of established shopping districts.
Last year San Francisco adopted Planning Code Section 703.3, a provision that...
Peter Swift, who has operated a New Urbanism-oriented transportation planning firm in Longmont, Colorado, is going to Iraq as director of town planning for a firm that will carry out large development efforts in the Kurdish northern section of the...
By Joanna Lombard Rizzoli, 2005, 176 pp., hardcover $49.95. Considering the enormous impact Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have made on town planning and urban design, it’s curious that so little has been said about the architecture...
The growing municipality of Pike Road outside of Montgomery, Alabama, approved in August a version of the SmartCode that will operate parallel to current zoning. The code was approved pending an annexation of The Waters, a large-scale TND in the...
Peachtree City, a suburban Georgia, municipality with 31,500 residents, has successfully promoted golf carts as an alternative mode of transportation. Founded in 1959, the municipality has 23 square miles and 90 miles of multiuse paths. More than 10...