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.
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.
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...
The East Beach project along Chesapeake Bay in Norfolk, Virginia, is attracting homebuyers to a section of the city that used to be so dangerous that cab drivers and pizza deliverers refused to go there. “Forty-five to fifty houses are under...
A credit line on page 14 of the January 2005 issue incorrectly identified the source of a redevelopment plan in South Euclid, Ohio. It should have stated Cupkovic Architects.
Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council (TCRPC) in Stuart, Florida, has sponsored approximately 90 new urban design charrettes in the last 17 years, far outdistancing any other public agency. Among the 537 regional planning councils in the US,...
An investigation by The Boston Globe found that firefighters respond faster to blazes in Boston and other big cities than they do to fires in many suburbs. A January series of articles revealed that the response time of American fire departments is...
Ken Hughes is staffing the task force, which he says is “on a fast track (pun intended) to get support for TODs, to complement the new intercity rail service the governor is pushing.” Hughes notes, “We’re slated to have rail service up and operating...
The Vermont Forum on Sprawl has issued a four-page color publication on the Vermont Neighborhoods Project, showing how new housing can be inserted gracefully into three Vermont communities: Shoreham, Middlebury, and Vergennes. The plans reflect...
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. “...