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.
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...
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...
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.
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...