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.
The success of River Ranch, a 256-acre community that Robert Daigle is developing in Lafayette, Louisiana, is spurring other people in Louisiana to consider Traditional Neighborhood Development. Officials of Ascension Parish, between New Orleans and...
Dial Realty of Kansas City, Missouri, began construction in June on Crescent Creek, a 22-acre Traditional Neighborhood Development in Raytown, a first-ring postwar suburb of Kansas City. A creek that runs through the site will remain open. On the...
Having made a fortune by founding the Internet service provider MindSpring and later merging it into EarthLink, Charles Brewer is in an enviable situation: he’s able to develop a new urban project in Atlanta “without borrowing a dime.” In the past...
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...
Jaime Correa, formerly of Correa Valle Valle and the Knight Professor of Community Building at the University of Miami, has formed a new architectural and town design firm, Jaime Correa and Associates. The new firm is currently working on three...
In addition to offering engaging speakers, lively debates, and
abundant opportunities for new urbanists to learn from each other, the Twelfth Congress for the New Urbanism in June distinguished itself as the largest Congress ever, drawing 1,370...
Robert Orr & Associates is also designing a proposed mixed-use redevelopment along the Quinnipiac River in the Fair Haven Heights section of New Haven for an investment group that includes Joel Schiavone, his daughter Allyx Schiavone, and...
One indicator of the growing desire to live in Manhattan is the conversion of gas stations to more valuable uses. “Since 1999, the number of gas stations in Manhattan has declined by 18 percent, to 207,” The New York Times reported June 7. “Cropping...
New urbanists often design infill projects in cities, new neighborhoods in the suburbs, and even create visions for growth on a regional scale. Rarely if ever do they get the opportunity to design a medium-sized city from scratch. That was...
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...