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.
The rules that govern land development are often impediments to New Urbanism. CNU is changing the rules.
Planning and zoning codes. Land development regulations. Bureaucratese. Call it what you will, there is nowhere in the United States that is...
Fort Myers, Florida, voted to approved a downtown revitalization plan by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ). The plan calls for medium sized buildings with mixed retail, offices, and housing set in a walkable main street environment. Codes to...
The Montgomery County Council recently approved the construction of a 65-foot-tall building with rental apartments over retail shops in Bethesda Row, a redevelopment in downtown Bethesda, Maryland. The mixed-use building will replace a one-story...
Calthorpe Associates of Berkeley, California, has concluded two years of regional visioning in Minneapolis/St. Paul and presented the Smart Growth Twin Cities development scenarios to the Metropolitan Council, the area’s regional planning agency....
Jim Jacoby, a developer who made millions building Wal-Marts on greenfield sites, has made a 180-degree turn in terms of environmental sustainability. Jacoby is the developer behind Atlantic Station, the intensive infill/brownfield redevelopment in...
Despite an abundance of compact, walkable, mixed-use towns dating back to the 19th, 18th, and even 17th centuries, Connecticut has been slow to welcome new developments that carry on those traits. Now the affluent town of Madison, about 20 miles...
The County Council in Los Alamos, New Mexico, unanimously approved a master plan for downtown Los Alamos, which could nearly triple the amount of commercial space. The plan was generated in a 2000 charrette led by Moule & Polyzoides Architects...
A 90-acre town center is under construction in Baxter Village, in Fort Mills, South Carolina. A main street connected to a hybrid of a conventional and new urban residential neighborhood, the town center will include about 130,000 square feet of...
Two projects show the future of production-built New UrbanismWest Park
Village and Longleaf — about 15 miles apart in the Tampa/St. Petersburg region — are two of a new generation of traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs). Both started...
In the redevelopment of a military base in Calgary, the Canada Lands Company discovers New Urbanism as the road to community building and financial success.
Quietly and with great speed, Garrison Woods has emerged as one of Canada’s most successful...
The movement needs more developers, more research, and strong standards, according to some.
The biggest challenge to New Urbanism is how to expand it well beyond its current minor share of the US development market.
That’s the conclusion that...
Atlanta has adopted zoning changes that should make it much easier to build live-work and mixed-use development. A new live- work zoning category will let people put their shop or office on the ground floor and occupy living quarters above. A mixed-...