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.
Since the Charter of the New Urbanism was written, people have argued about how well development projects fulfill its principles. Homebuyers, investors, and public officials all want to know if a project is real New Urbanism. Various individuals...
A five-story, 65-foot-high apartment building has been approved for construction near Federal Realty Investment Trust’s Bethesda Row project in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. The Montgomery County Planning Board gave the go-ahead to the project –- to...
II. Terminated Vistas Considering what the pedestrian and driver see ahead is one of the basic tasks of good urban design; management of vistas is not an empty formal gesture. It helps people get around more easily and interestingly, and it...
Deep pockets of developer keep town, built on the site of a former airport, moving forward. Bombardier, the big Canadian manufacturer of trains, planes, and watercraft, has found a way to keep its 500-acre Bois-Franc development in Montreal...
As part of a strategy announced in 1998, the city of Albuquerque set out to convert its one-way downtown streets back to two-way. One pair of one-way streets reverted to two-way traffic two years ago, and four other pairs – eight streets – are now...
Tucson’s sustainable, new urban development loses its leading advocate. After constructing narrow streets, a neighborhood center, and about 250 energy-efficient houses, the developer of Civano may be backing away from the principles of New...
Santa Fe Council tries to organize efforts toward zoning reform. Before New Year’s Day, the SmartCode developed by Duany Plater- Zyberk & Company will make its long-awaited debut. “We intend to start printing it before the end of the year,”...
Until Benjamin C. Thompson applied his imaginative touch, urban markets in the US mainly were somewhat grubby, underappreciated places that sold fish, meat, produce, and other necessities of life. The St. Paul-born, Yale-educated Thompson, who died...
Are New Urbanism and environmentalism potentially strong allies? One place to look for an answer is Denver’s Stapleton Airport redevelopment. Not only does the 4,700-acre project offer a combination of housing, employment, shopping, and neighborhood...
New urbanists have always been interested in street design. Since the New Urbanism was founded, its practitioners have experimented with street patterns, widths, and adjacent buildings. However, most of these efforts have resulted in one-time...
People who buy homes within a quarter-mile of a bus line or within a half-mile of a train station can now qualify with Fannie Mae for a mortgage eight percent larger in a growing number of cities. The company began offering larger mortgages three...
The Urban Land Institute published Great Planned Communities, a look at 26 large-scale master planned developments around the world. Although a few of the communities began construction in the 1960s and 1970s, most were designed in the last 10 years...