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.
Adoption of form-based codes in Petaluma, California, and Arlington County, Virginia, is quickly paying off with new buildings that line the sidewalks and streets. In Petaluma, which enacted a version of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company’s SmartCode...
By Urban Design Associates W.W. Norton, 2004, 230 pp., $55 paperback. In the 1970s, Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates (UDA) photodocumented every house in a historic district in York, a small southcentral Pennsylvania city that had...
Pittsburghers are up in arms over a proposal to stop spending municipal funds to repair the hundreds of stairs that climb the city’s hills. In The Steps of Pittsburgh (reviewed in the June 2004 New Urban News), author Bob Regan reports that the 2002...
The following letter from CNU Board Chair Hank Dittmar is adapted from his opening address at CNU XII in Chicago.
It was especially gratifying to be part of CNU XXII in Chicago.
New urbanists have designed mixed-use office districts and retrofitted suburban office parks by adding walkable town centers. The transformation of an existing suburban office park into a mixed-use urban workplace district has never been attempted,...
In greater New York, suburban development no longer outcompetes development in the urban core. In a 31-county region centered on New York City, the urban core began in the mid-1990s to gain residents and jobs at the same rate as the periphery,...
Developer New Urban Communities looks to South Miami and the Chicago area next.
Along-dormant section of Delray Beach, Florida, is begin-ning to revive, thanks in part to a townhouse, retail, office, and loft project organized by New Urban...
Wisconsin project balances need for anchor store with sensitivity of impact.
New urbanists are continually hon-ing their strategies for how to make mixed-use town centers work. A great example is Middleton Hills, a traditional neighborhood...
By John Zukowsky and Martha Thorne Rizzoli and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2004, 240 pp., $65. Chicagoans seem transfixed by their city’s role in American architecture. The reason is simple: from the late 19th century to the 1960s, native or...
The first issue of New Urban Living, a full-color bimonthly magazine aimed at showing how new urban communities deliver a better quality of life, has been published by New Urban Living LLC of Ormond Beach, Florida. The 72-page premier issue, dated...
The New York State Department of Transportation is warming up to modern roundabouts. This summer DOT completed installation of the first roundabout in Washington County, northeast of Albany. It’s at the intersection of Routes 29 and 40 in Greenwich...
Smith Wilson and Pamela S. NeSmith have nearly completed the conversion of a former Coca-Cola bottling works in Athens, Georgia, to townhouses, flats, restaurants, shops, and offices. The two Athens-based developers have sold all but 2 of the 13...