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.
Hillsborough County, where Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company completed a semiregionial plan in 1999, is pursuing a number of new urban plans. The county approved a traditional neighborhood development ordinance in October, 2002, according to county...
As we go to press, the New Urbanism division of the American Planning Association has just completed elections for its three officer positions. All were contested races. If you are an APA member and are interested in taking part in this new division...
The American Farmland Trust says the US is losing two acres of mostly prime farmland to development every minute. “We are consuming more land per person than at any time, in the most wasteful way,” said Trust President Ralph Grossi. More than half...
A three-year study sponsored by Smart Growth America reveals higher traffic fatality rates and poorer air quality afflicting metropolitan areas that sprawl. The ten most-sprawling areas average 36 traffic deaths per 100,000 people, while the least...
The Layered Vista combines the Terminated Vista with the Deflected Vista. (These latter were discussed in the previous two Technical Pages.) It names the situation in which the view down a street frames a distant feature which appears above, or...
Miami Township, Ohio, is planning to convert a mile-long economically depressed suburban commercial corridor to a town center with neighborhoods. The township, an affluent suburb of Cincinnati, is assembling three key parcels amounting to nearly 50...
The words “New Jersey” often conjure up images of strip malls and congested highways. In other words, the worst of suburban sprawl.
But that’s exactly what Governor James E.
Chicago has a much more mixed pattern of development in and near downtown than existed 20 years ago. The central area, about 1.5 miles wide and 4.5 miles long, had a resident population of about 53,400 in 1980. Now it’s home to between 85,000 and 90...
Miami-Dade County, Florida, has created an Urban Design Center headed by new urbanists. Director Shailendra Singh worked for Correa Valle Valle architects, and principal planner Natasha Alfonso worked at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., both new urban...
Since CNU was founded, the movement has in large part developed in conferences, seminars, summits, and newsletters. But every week, hundreds of urbanists are learning from intense on-line discussions. Electronic resources, both from CNU and from...
The next phase of CNU's greyfields research is moving toward completion. CNU's Ellen Greenberg and members of the Development and Project Implementation Task Force are writing a how-to manual on greyfield redevelopment. It will address how more...
The suburban Toledo community of Perrysburg, Ohio, is moving expeditiously to adopt a proposed urban village overlay district plan. On Jan. 9, the planning commission officially recommended the measure to city council.
City planning and zoning...