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.
“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...
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...
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...
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...
Speed humps are beginning to face resistance from motorists, The Christian Science Monitor reports. The flat-topped traffic-calming devices, less abrupt than speed bumps, generally succeed in forcing drivers to slow down – at least briefly. Four...
III. The court and courtyard
Category: semipublic space
The passage and the forecourt, discussed in earlier issues of the Technical Page, are movement spaces linking the public realm of the street with the semipublic realm of an interior entry...