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.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is supporting a program to ‘change the mindset of the whole country.’
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s campaign to reform Americans’ unhealthy way of life is growing into an impressively well- financed effort —...
December 9, a historic meeting brought advocates of walkable, transit-oriented streets together with the transportation establishment. It was a promising start on joint work on street design guidance for walkable communities.
Sharbell Development Corporation is finalizing construction plans for Village Center, in Plainsboro, NJ, with an eye to breaking ground in the spring. The site plan for the 16-acre development in Middlesex County won final approval on December 16th...
In Gwinnett County, Georgia (suburban Atlanta), a new smart growth overlay ordinance targets a landscape of aging malls and big-box stores for redevelopment as mixed-use neighborhoods. Eligible developments—at least 10 acres and built on already-...
Dowell Myers and Elizabeth Gearin of the University of Southern California list six factors that — along with the aging of the population — could lead more and more people to prefer denser, walkable neighborhoods. The six factors exist to varying...
A clue to the unfolding transformation of Beekman Street in Saratoga Springs is a tiny barber shop with a sign in its window announcing that the 15-by-20-foot building is soon to become a coffee bar.
Beekman Street, which decades ago boasted a mix...
Experts debate alternatives to conventional thoroughfare design and street networks.
December 10 and 11, 50 CNU members met in Oakland, California for a groundbreaking meeting about planning and designing streets. The gathering included...
Federal Reserve governor Edward Gramlich says the US could save $250 billion over the next 25 years by adopting smart growth strategies in preference to continued sprawl development.
A new ordinance in Howard County, Maryland, requires developers to set aside a portion of their housing production for moderate-income families. The first beneficiaries of the ordinance are nine families that were allowed to buy townhouses for half...
An international group of planners rethinks how the city’s industrial waterfront should mature.
Toronto residents are getting excited about the idea of creating “water rooms” on underused land between the Canadian city’s downtown and nearby Lake...
Saratoga Springs, an Upstate New York city best known for spas and horse racing, may become one of the first municipalities in the Northeast to apply Andres Duany’s Transect concept to its zoning. The 26,000-population city about 30 miles north of...
Lee Sobel, former Knight Fellow with the University of Miami and author of the CNU publication Greyfields into Goldfields, left CB Richard Ellis to work with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth Division, where he will focus on real...