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.
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...
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...
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...
The Town of Brookhaven on New York’s Long Island imposed a six-month moratorium on development in an unattractive strip commercial stretch of the Montauk Highway. The moratorium is allowing time for Colorado-based consultant Peter Swift to draw up a...
At its meeting during the last weekend of September, CNU’s Board of Directors made important decisions. It moved forward with chapters (see page 21). In addition:
• Stephanie Bothwell was unanimously appointed to the board. A landscape architect,...
Urban design strategies for a neighborhood in San Jose, California, soon to be served by light-rail transit were the focus of a charrette conducted Nov. 13-18 by the University of Miami’s Knight Program in Community Building. Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk...
Architect Witold Rybczynski, editor of the Wharton Real Estate Review, has written one of the best financial analyses to date of new urban communities. “The Art of the New Urbanist Deal,” in the fall issue of the Review, examines four new urban...