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.
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...
A sampling of recent media reports shows the New Urbanism is making inroads in the Midwest. Three prime examples:
Akron, Ohio. An embattled new urbanist project, Canal Town Builders’ ten-acre Hickory Street residential development, won city council...
Joe Alfandre, developer of Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has been putting his experience to work consulting. According to the LeGrange Daily News, he was hired by the City of LeGrange, Georgia, to help officials apply new urban principles and...
Some high schools in Connecticut are imposing stricter limits on how many students can drive to school, The New York Times reports. Adolescents’ cars are filling parking lots and nearby streets to overflowing. Safety is also an issue. The...
“We’ve spent years designing [neighborhoods] that take us from house to lawn to street [with no socialization]. We’re going to have to build differently.”
—Watts Wacker, futurist and author of The 500-Year Delta, speaking in November to the fall...
To the Editor:
In an article in the December issue, I was quoted as stating that, two years ago, the new urbanist community of Civano was not making money and that the ambitious design and performance goals imposed by the City of Tucson added extra...
Matt Shannon, formerly of DPZ, has been named director of the redevelopment agency in Temple Terrace, Florida, outside Tampa. His biggest task will be to coordinate the development of a 33-acre, walkable, mixed-use town center.
A master plan for LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia, 60 miles southwest of Atlanta, calls for new college facilities and private development around the town’s Lafayette Square. Urban Design Associates of Pittsburgh worked on the plan, which...
By a farecard-thin margin of 94,993 to 94,116, Seattle voters decided in November to build a monorail system. Voters authorized a 1.4 percent annual motor vehicle excise tax to build the first 14-mile, $1.7 million north-south leg of the system —...
III. The Deflected Vista
The deflected vista is a promise. Its job is to provide visual interest at key points along a line of movement, but in a way that clearly defers to a prospective goal. To succeed in this ambivalent task, a deflected vista...
A 1,200-unit new urban development in the small coastal town of Brookings, Oregon, will carry on the building traditions of the early 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck.
From 1913 to 1915, Maybeck worked on a company...
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 —...