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.
A new study by the Victoria Transport Policy Institute shows that in cities with large rail transit systems, per-capita traffic fatalities are 36 percent lower, per-capita consumer transportation expenditures are 14 percent lower, and per-capita...
Architect Richard McLaughlin has created the N-vision Neighborhood Modeling System, which consists of a handbook and CD-ROM, plus a 1,000-piece “wood chip” set, enough to model a 40-acre mixed-use neighborhood. Additional wood chips — small wood-...
When it convenes in Chicago from June 24 to 27, the Twelfth Congress for the New Urbanism will convey both a respect for tradition and openness to debate and innovation.
Enriched by their connections to CNU’s host city — a storied metropolis...
You’ve heard pop sociologists talk about “cocooning” — the tendency of families to retreat from the outside world. The marketing consulting group Yankelovich says cocooning is being challenged by a newer trend: “hiving.” “A hive is a home designed...
Edited by Emilie Buchwald Milkweed Editions, 2003, 326 pp., paperback $18.95. In The City in Mind, James Howard Kunstler convincingly argued that contemporary America’s fixation with “green space” often leads to exceedingly dull and anti-urban...
The Architects’ Guild came into existence three years ago, intent on selling stock house plans, generating other avenues of work for new urbanist traditional architects, and helping those architects to make a growing impact on the built environment...
Communities are choosing among more than one method when they set out to connect streets more thoroughly. The most prevalent method involves setting a few common-sense rules — limiting the lengths of blocks, prohibiting gated subdivisions,...
As the City of Alexandria sets about hiring a consultant to guide the redevelopment of its Braddock Street Metro station area, it is already well-armed with information and ideas, thanks to preliminary consultations by Virginia Tech adjunct...
Peter Katz, a “professor in practice” at the Alexandria branch of Virginia Tech, visited the main campus in Blacksburg April 19 to talk about New Urbanism and form-based coding. “I was surprised at the reaction,” said Diane L. Zahm, associate...
Voters in Inglewood, California, rejected a ballot initiative that would have allowed a 60-acre Wal-Mart shopping complex to be built without being subject to many state and local regulations. Sixty percent of the voters in the racially mixed...
Newport, Rhode Island, is thinking about installing at least seven modern low-speed roundabouts and reducing its four- to five-lane America’s Cup harborside arterial to a two-lane avenue with bike lanes, widened sidewalks, and tree canopies as it...