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.
As residential construction moves closer to urban rail lines, bridges, and freeway ramps, developers are increasingly using sound-muffling windows and other techniques to keep noise out of new housing. A window wall for a 60-story condo tower next...
By Alexander Tzonis Rizzoli International, 2004, 432 pp., hardcover $75. From Athens to Zurich, to Bilbao, to Milwaukee, structures designed by Santiago Calatrava have been inspiring awe among citizens of the world for nearly 20 years. The...
A design competition for a state capitol building for Alaska — the only state without one — generated extremely modernist entries that are at odds with the urban context and the traditional style of most state capitols. The winner, from Morphosis of...
A suburban city that never had a center moves forward with a downtown.
For more than three years, Temple Terrace, Florida, on the
northeast edge of Tampa, has been preparing for what Ralph Bosek regards as the municipality’s one big chance to...
While many developers simply allow churches to compete on the open market for available parcels of land, some developers provide incentives to help attract a community of faith to a particular location.
How do you propel a second-tier state university into academia’s upper echelon? In the case of the University of Connecticut, you spend billions of dollars from the state government to improve the campus — and you hire consultants steeped in New...
The Macon-Bibb County Planning and Zoning Commission unanimously approved ordinances Jan. 10 establishing the Beall’s Hill Historic Planning Development District. The Commission’s action is expected to spur well-conceived infill development in the...
The majority of America’s dwellings have been built since World War II. The very large majority of those, in turn, are suburban. Early versions of suburban houses were the smallish (by today’s standards), underaccessorized, single-family “American...
HDR, an architecture, engineering, and construction management firm with 3,700 employees, has acquired two small but noted new urbanist design firms, LCA Town Planning & Architecture and Sargent Town Planning. These firms will go under the name...
A radical anti-sprawl group, the Earth Liberation Front, has claimed responsibility for setting fire to three luxury homes under construction at the Island Estates Development on what was one of Long Island’s last remaining farms. Smoke and flame...
The final leg of the 12-mile Hiawatha light-rail line connecting downtown Minneapolis to Twin Cities International Airport and Mall of America opened in December, fostering housing development at both ends of its route. One study has associated the...
Ellen Greenberg, former director of policy and research at the Congress for the New Urbanism, is now a principal with the urban design firm Freedman, Tung & Bottomley.