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.
Every six years, transportation and land-use advocates have a chance to influence one of the biggest, most powerful pots of money in the world — the US government’s transportation funding act. In 1991 and 1997, the last two federal funding acts...
Leading new urbanist theorist and academician Douglas S. Kel-baugh wrote Repairing the American Metropolis: Common Place Revisited, published recently by the University of Washington Press. The book, a successor to the author’s 1997 Common Place,...
A Modern Arcadia, by Susan L. Klaus, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, tells the story of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York. Designed in 1909 by Frederick Law Omsted Jr., this commuter rail suburb of Manhattan set one of the...
The plan for Lantern Hill (above), an 18-acre infill development in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, shows 117 homes and 80,000 square feet of commercial buildings grouped around three small greens. One of the greens is rendered below. The project, under...
“Houses could be spitting distance from one another, a big departure from the supersize lots in many Madison County subdivisions,” the Huntsville Times said in an April report about plans for a TND in that northern Alabama city.
A caption on the front page of the September New Urban News said Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco is “soon to be built.” This turns out to be not quite accurate. In November 1998 San Francisco voters passed a proposition to replace part of the...
With funding from an investor, the architecture and town planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) & Company has created a $5-million venture capital fund to plan and permit new urban communities throughout the US. The Fund for New Urbanism seeks...
Getting more Americans out of their cars and onto buses or trains is the most effective way of cutting air pollution and reducing energy consumption without imposing new taxes, regulations, or government mandates, a new study says.
Public...
The Texas Department of Transportation has earmarked $3 million in federal funds for sidewalks, crosswalks, bike paths, and other elements that will make it safer for schoolchildren to walk or ride their bicycles to school. Much of the money will be...
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...
A 100-unit senior citizens apartment building called Franklin Arms is under construction in Norfolk, Virginia, as the first part of the HOPE VI redevelopment of the Bowling Green and Roberts Village public housing complex. The aim is to create an...
Six years ago, Safeway was defeated in its attempt to build a mixed-use retail center in Colorado called the North Boulder Village Center. The outcome was a disappointment for designer Peter Calthorpe, who looked at the plan as a potential model for...