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.
Peter Brown, a planning consultant and advocate of New Urbanism, narrowly lost his race for Houston City Council in November. Running against an incumbent, Brown garnered 48 percent of the vote for an at-large council seat. He intends to try again...
It may cost more to live in the suburbs than the city, when the expenses of commuting and of operating and maintaining a larger suburban house are included. That’s the conclusion of a study in greater Toronto led by Eric Miller of the University of...
Magnolia Square, a 300-acre high-density new urban development in The Colony, Texas , has completed two phases which are appraised at $60 million, according to a report in the Colony Courier-Leader. City officials are pleased at the tax revenues...
A municipally sponsored development in downtown Princeton, New Jersey, is converting two borough-owned parking lots into a $27 million mixed-use project that includes a new outdoor plaza next to Princeton’s new public library.
Edited by John Morris Dixon; designed by Harish K. Patel Visual Reference Publications, Urban Land Institute, 2004, 328 pp., $59.99. The introduction and preface to Urban Spaces cover many of the talking points that are familiar to new...
Mark Schimmenti, design director of the Nashville Civic
Design Center, says design professionals and grassroots activists began thinking in the 1990s that Nashville needed a design center because “they had noticed that cities that seemed to be...
By one estimate, roughly 1,500 new housing units are needed to build one new block of stores.
Many communities hunger these days for “Main Street retail” or “neighborhood retail.” Few, however, know how many households — and shoppers’ dollars —...
For three years, The Round at Beaverton, Oregon, was a high-profile poster child for the failure of a transit-oriented development (TOD). When opponents of transit wanted to show that the market rejects TOD, they showed pictures of The Round, where...
Widespread opposition to sprawl caused developers John and Leslye Wuerfel to cancel plans for building a 4,000-seat minor-league baseball park on 45 acres of farmland in Elmwood Township, near Traverse City, Michigan. “I think if you’re going to...
Document of core principles may expand to cover New Urbanism’s relationship to the environment and the Transect
The Charter of the New Urbanism is CNU’s proudest single achievement. Ratified at CNU IV in Charleston in 1996, the charter exposes...
Chicago architect Philip Bess is the new director of the graduate program in architecture at the University of Notre Dame. He hopes to introduce the craft of classical architecture and the form and politics of traditional urbanism into the school’s...
Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. proposed in early February that the state’s Office of Smart Growth be abolished. Its sprawl-fighting functions would be carried on by the Department of Planning. Chuck Gates in the Department of Planning said five...