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.
Phoenix, Arizona, has a light-rail line under construction that will connect the city to Mesa and Tempa, due for completion in 2008. Community Design + Architecture of Berkeley, California, was hired to create vision plans for transit-oriented...
Dan Burden, who for years operated Walkable Communities Inc. (see Dec. 2004 New Urban News), joined the firm of Glatting Jackson Kercher Anglin Lopez Rinehart Feb. 7. Burden is now part of the urban design and transportation service group at...
Baldwin Park, a new urban redevelopment of a former naval training center in Orlando, has a town center that is far behind schedule, according to the Orlando Business Journal. Tenants signed on to the project soon after Unicorp National Developers...
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.
In Drachten and other small communities in northern Holland, traffic engineer Hans Monderman is stirring debate by eliminating many of the customary elements of streets and roads, such as traffic lights, speed limit signs, and pavement markings. “...
McCaffery Interests, which built the highly successful Market Common, Clarendon transit-oriented, mixed-use project in Arlington, Virginia, has another project in the works of the same name. Market Common in Myrtle Beach is described as an “urban...