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.
A street grid adds a human-scale element, enhances transit access, and creates the potential for urban-style redevelopment in two recent Colorado power centers.
Two Denver area shopping centers show how large-scale retail, when subjected to...
Peter Calthorpe’s “urban network” inspired architect Kevin Klinkenberg of Kansas City, Missouri, to offer an alternative system — clearly indebted to Calthorpe’s proposal, but with assumptions drawn from current retail methods, open space planning...
Researchers in North Carolina have found that in greenfield development, New Urbanism is far better than conventional development at protecting watersheds, mitigating the impact of runoff, and restoring degraded streams.
“New Urbanism offers a...
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,...
Construction has started on the Village Marketplace, a collection of 110,000 square feet of retail and 45,000 square feet of offices framing a broad pedestrian plaza in Carpenter Village, a Traditional Neighborhood Development that W&W Partners...
A 67-acre tract called Reservation 13 in the District of Columbia, the site of the former DC General Hospital campus, is off the traditional street grid and constitutes a barrier between southeast Washington neighborhoods and the Anacostia River. A...
If you wanted to briefly summarize the lessons that have been learned recently about how to create and manage mixed-income housing, here are four items that would appear at the top of the list:
• Make sure the facades of the lower-cost housing look...
Exactly one month before it was to open, Federal Realty Investment Trust’s Santana Row project in San Jose, California, suffered a massive fire that destroyed its centerpiece building, covering a city block. The August 19 fire, the largest in the...
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...
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...