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.
Between 1979 and 1999, “middle-class households remained a significant, even growing presence in a number of mostly middle-sized cities such as Grand Rapids, Tacoma, and St. Petersburg,” says a Brookings Institution analysis of census data by Alan...
The Airport Authority of Gadsden, Alabama, recently selected a design team headed by Pittsburgh’s LaQuatra Bonci Associates to create a new urban master plan for 385 acres owned by the authority. Other team members include Michael Meddick, ACP...
Alan Hoffman, one of the founders of Aldea, a new urban community underway near Santa Fe, NM, is now proposing Oshara Village, a new town with 735 units and substantial commercial, also near Santa Fe. The town’s plaza would be bounded on one side...
The National Center for Bicycling and Walking, based in Washington, DC, teamed up with the Rhode Island Statewide Planning Program to conduct workshops in eight Rhode Island municipalities on how to make communities more pedestrian-friendly. Mark...
Ed McMahon, an attorney and planner who cofounded Scenic America and has been vice president and director of land use programs at The Conservation Fund, has been named Charles Fraser Senior Resident Fellow for Sustainable Development at the Urban...
The winners of CNU’s Charter Awards don’t just look good in magazine spreads. By embodying the principles of the Charter, they illustrate how New Urbanism improves and enriches our built landscape.
This fall the educational value of the awards...
By Dolores Hayden with aerial photographs by Jim Wark W.W. Norton, 2004, 128 pp., $24.95. The latest book by Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, possesses the earnestness found in just about every strongly...
When Walgreens anticipated it would have a hard time gaining permission to build a drugstore at the main intersection in Poland, Ohio, the company sought advice from a longtime local resident, Robert A. Mastriana. Mastriana, an architect and a...
“There’s a lot of new urbanist development going on in
South Florida,” says Thomas Jeffrey, chief financial officer of American Ventures Realty Investors, which manages the new South Florida Urban Initiatives Fund. “We’re got probably close to...
• Conceal the protection
• Retain pedestrian access, requiring
permeability
• Integrate security design and urban design
• Incorporate streetscape elements, such as trees and light fixtures, only as non- structural components of the...
Brian Wright recently moved on from Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company to become the director of town planning and urban design at the Southern Land Company. u
Three Chicago area organizations — the Campaign for Sensible Growth, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, and the Metropolitan Planning Council — have produced a 66-page workbook, Sensible Tools for Healthy Communities: A Decision-Making Workbook for...