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.
Five years after the nation’s largest builder suffered a setback when its first new urban development was rejected, the project has come back with a new developer and new design.
Vizcaya, a 160-acre traditional neighborhood development designed by...
It began with an idea from planning consultant Brad Scheib of Hoisington Koegler Group in 1998: Why not build a mixed-use development in Ramsey, a growing suburb 20 miles northwest of downtown Minneapolis? “Mostly the reaction was ‘we can’t do that...
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...
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...
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...
City planners in Punta Gorda, Florida, won a dispute with the city housing authority over plans to replace public housing destroyed by Hurricane Charley, according to the Herald-Tribune newspaper. The authority originally planned 184 campus-style...