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.
Mashpee Commons in Mashpee, Massachusetts, is getting close to completing three live-work units – the first of 30 to 35 that will be built, according to Doug Storrs of Cornish Associates, the developer. The 2,100 sq. ft., two-story shopfront houses...
Eight hundred acres of the former Fort Ord, an Army base about 100 miles south of San Francisco, are about to be developed into a mixed-use community featuring live-work lofts for artists and a large complement of permanently affordable housing. Two...
“A review of key state and local planning records” reveals “no significant shifts in Maryland’s development patterns since the passage of [former Governor Parris] Glendening’s smart growth package,” the Washington Post reported Aug. 10 in a detailed...
A new firm, DPZ-Pacific, has been formed by former Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) director Demetri Baches, and three former DPZ staffers: Mallory Baches, Ludwig Fontalvo-Abello, and Kamal Zaharin. The firm, a “DPZ affiliate,” Baches says,...
Architect Tom Low is trying to rally support for an urban design center for the Charlotte region, modeled after Nashville’s Civic Design Center. The most critical design challenge for the region is influencing development taking place near the new...
After seven years of planning and nine months of site preparation, homes are slated to be under construction in Norton Commons in October. The 600-acre new town near Louisville, Kentucky, will eventually have 2,880 houses and 560,000 square feet or...
Dane County developed its model ordinance by researching codes approved in cities like Columbus, Ohio, and Austin, Texas, says county planner Steve Steinhoff. Elements of these codes were combined into an ordinance and refined by a multimunicipal...
The authors of two bibliographies of scholarly research on new urbanist topics share a few highlights from the lists.
“Factors influencing light-rail station boardings in the United States,” by Michael Kuby et al. in Transportation Research Part...
David Walters and Linda Luise Brown Architectural Press, 2004, 277 pp., paperback $44.95 Urban designers have benefited greatly from publications that have become available over the past few years. Some books are practical manuals that remain...
Salinas, California, where novelist and short-story writer John Steinbeck was born, is trying to encourage new urbanist forms of development in an eight-block section of downtown and in “future growth areas” that until now have remained largely...
Leading figures in the Congress for the New Urbanism are trying to overcome a simmering conflict with advocates of the disabled. For more than two years, groups such as the Disability Rights Action Coalition for Housing (DRACH) have complained that...
Producer Kyle Justice has put together a 22-minute promotional video/DVD for the new town of Seabrook in Pacific Beach, Washington. The high-quality video includes footage of TNDs and interviews with developer Casey Roloff, designer Laurence Qamar,...