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.
Americans paid more for gasoline in 2004 than in 2003, and the biggest cost escalation occurred in metropolitan Los Angeles, where the average household’s expenditure rose by $316. That finding is contained in “Driven to Spend,” a new report from...
Dan Camp, developer of the Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi, was elected mayor of Starkville June 7, winning 61 percent of the vote. Camp argued during the campaign that a new police headquarters and municipal court facility should be...
A two-story office and retail building will house a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in downtown Carmel, Indiana, according to the Indianapolis Star. The building will have a drive-through lane, but will be placed close to the street and have more...
Stuart Sirota has left the Baltimore office of Parsons Brinckerhoff to start TND Planning Group, a “planning, design, and development practice that focuses on bringing New Urbanism and placemaking to the marketplace.” Email is stusirota@verizon.net...
Following the example of famous old bridges in Europe, a developer in Columbus, Ohio, has lined a bridge near downtown Columbus with rows of buildings containing stores, cafes, and restaurants. The “Cap at Union Station,” as some call the project,...
To understand where the best “affordable housing” production in the US is heading, an organization worth studying is Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise (CNE). Founded in 1986 after participants in a Chattanooga “community visioning” process agreed...
W.W. Norton & Company, 2005, 417 pp., hardcover $50. I first heard of Werner Hegemann around 1988, when his greatest book, The American Vitruvius: An Architects’ Handbook of Civic Art, was republished by Princeton Architectural Press after...
Frank Gehry received an award at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference in Pasadena for his Disney Hall, a move that was controversial among members and surprising to some outside of the organization.
Five Civic Art Awards were selected and...
Leon Krier has designed a new building for the University of Miami School of Architecture. The Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center is under construction and is slated to be completed this summer. A world-renowned architectural theorist who has been...
A dilapidated, World War II era apartment complex in Baltimore County, Maryland, was approved to be converted to a small new urban neighborhood under an innovative charrette-based entitlement process. The process, made law by the county in December...
Wal-Mart has abandoned its attempt to evade an ordinance in Calvert County, Maryland, that bans stores of more than 75,000 square feet in small town centers. The Bentonville, Arkansas, operator of more than 3,000 stores had intended to build a 74,...
Chris Leinberger of Arcadia Land Company, who has been a key figure in the renaissance of downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico, will be a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, starting in July. Working with the Metropolitan...