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.
In Issue 7 of The Next American City, contributing writer Kenneth Naylor offers a nuanced view of the not-quite new urbanist development known as Aqua, on Allison Island near Miami Beach. Naylor suggests that new urban planning and Modernist...
By Mark C. Childs University of New Mexico Press, 2004, 230 pp., hardcover $45. At first, Squares annoyed me. The Table of Contents fills five entire pages, the “Table of Queries” goes on for seven more, and then the Table of Figures consumes...
The future of residential construction within reasonable commuting distance of the nation’s capital lies in higher-density and transit-oriented development, says Robert Kettler, chairman of KSI. “The Washington marketplace has been picked pretty...
About 1,000 people — the most ever — attended the fourth annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Miami Beach, addressing topics such as implementation, social equity, transit-oriented development (TOD), and the importance of smart growth...
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...
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...