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.
Mouzon Design of Huntsville, Alabama, has released the Historic District Photo Catalog, a collection of eight CD-ROMs with high-resolution images of historic structures in Southern cities and towns. Each disk contains between 700 and 900 color...
The path has been cleared for Atlantic Station (formerly Atlantic Steel), the $2 billion mixed-use, brownfield project in Midtown Atlanta. Demolition of the old steel mill and remediation of the site is close to complete, and with the final...
Landscape architect David Yocca and his firm Conservation Design Forum of Elmhurst, Illinois, have been hired to design a new urbanist community on an 831-acre site in the small town of Plano, about 50 miles from downtown Chicago. Yocca has...
David Weekly Homes is the latest builder to join neotraditional Avalon Park in east Orlando, Florida. Weekly purchased 90 home sites in the fast-selling project, and will offer homes ranging from $200,000 to $350,000. Weekly is already building in...
Ellen Dunham-Jones was hired to direct the architecture program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Dunham-Jones, a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, is leaving her position as associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts...
Paseo Colorado, a $200 million new urban redevelopment of a failed shopping mall in Pasadena, California, staged its grand opening in October. About 70 shops and restaurants were expected to open in coming months in a tough retail climate. The...
CNU’s year-end membership and fundraising drive is on. Do you know anyone who should be a CNU member but isn’t? A coworker, client, student, or friend? You can give CNU memberships as holiday presents. CNU’s books and videos also make great gifts....
Providence, a 90-acre traditional neighborhood development, has been proposed in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, a suburb of Madison. The 421-unit project also is designed to include 36,000 square feet of commercial space, a church, a school run by the...
The Planning Commission of the City of Charlotte, North Carolina, has hired local design firm Land Design to create a master plan for the redevelopment of the Second Ward Neighborhood, which covers 11 city blocks (about 114 acres) near the downtown...
II. The civic plaza
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
It is often the case that important civic buildings are physically smaller than the private structures around them. Since the human species is given to mistaking...
Ancillary unit defined: an apartment not greater than 600 square feet sharing utility connections with a principal building. It may or may not be a separate building. Ancillary units do not count toward maximum density calculations.
Ancillary units...
A new video, “Walkable Streets and the Fire Department,” from the Local Government Commission’s Center for Livable Communities offers a tool to bridge the communication gap between new urbanists and fire and public works departments. A manual...