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.
Students for the New Urbanism at the University of Minnesota sponsored a panel discussion featuring Charles Bohl, director of the University of Miami’s Knight Program in Community Building and author of Place Making. The mid-April program was...
Dr. Arthur J. Naparstek, an urban redevelopment expert whose thinking helped generate the federal HOPE VI public housing rebuilding program, died April 24 in Cleveland, where he had been director of the Cleveland Foundation Commission on Poverty and...
The Conservation Fund has issued a publication, Better Models for Commercial Development, subtitled Ideas for Improving the Design and Siting of Chain Stores and Franchises. The booklet “is designed to show how new commercial development can be made...
On any given day, more than half the non-drivers aged 65 and over stay home because their transportation choices are limited, says a new report from the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP). “Aging Americans: Stranded Without Options” warns...
Glenwood Park, the 28-acre new urban infill development of former Internet pioneer Charles Brewer, is scheduled to open in the fall of 2004 in Atlanta, Georgia. The project will include 425 homes, shops, and offices. Parkside Partners recently...
The most entertaining character in Toward the Livable City is not an author or essayist. It is a talking squirrel with tire tracks across his abdomen and tail: Roadkill Bill. Ken Avidor, a 49-year-old Minneapolis illustrator and sculptor, created...
Homeowners in Norfolk, Virginia, are responding enthusiastically to a 70-page pattern book that presents a wealth of ideas on how to enlarge, remodel, or restyle houses in that 234,000-population city.
Fanis Grammenos, senior researcher for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation in Ottawa, has devised another approach to connectivity, which he calls the Fused Grid. Grammenos does not connect the streets nearly as much as new urbanists...
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...
Brian Hendrickson and Kevin Klinkenberg are planning to develop 12 townhouses, two duplexes, and two single-family detached houses on a one-acre site in the Longfellow neighborhood just south of downtown Kansas City, Missouri. Hendrickson and...
University of Maryland won a Charter Award this year in the student/faculty submissions category for an urban infill project in Italy. It also won honorable mention for a Maryland transit-oriented development and a downtown redevelopment in Hawaii....
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...