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.
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) has been hired by a private landowner to design a redevelopment of a 40-acre parcel in the edge city of Tysons Corner, Virginia. According to the Washington Post, the planned development may include high-rise...
The City of Lenexa, Kansas, has signed a letter of intent with the Gainesville, Florida-based Haile Group to develop a new urbanist city center. A preliminary plan for the 62-acre site has been created by urban designer Michael Morrissey and Haile...
Work has begun on the commercial town center in Lowry, the redevelopment of an 1,866-acre Air Force base on the Denver/Aurora town line in Colorado. A 50,000 sq. ft. Al-bertson’s supermarket anchors the town center, which will include 118,000 square...
New urbanist design firm Correa Valle Valle of Coral Gables, Florida, has won two smart growth awards for its charrette and plan for a redevelopment of a historic industrial neighborhood in Asheville, North Carolina.
Morrison Homes, a national building firm with experience in several new urbanist developments, has conducted a study to determine how appreciation rates in three traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs), Kentlands, Celebration, and Laguna West,...
John Anderson of New Urban Builders offers 10 tips on designing neighborhoods and homes for energy conservation in sunny north central California: 1) Orient the long side of a rectilinear block running north/south — this allows narrow and deep lots...
The new master plan for Gorham’s Bluff in Alabama strives for greater economic diversity and proposes an innovative integration of an assisted living center.
When this remote community in the Appalachian Mountains was first designed in 1993, it...
SprawlWatch Clearinghouse offers “How Smart Growth Can Stop Sprawl: A Briefing Guide for Funders,” by David Bollier. Contact: (202) 332-7000 or see www. sprawlwatch.org.
Work will soon begin on a long-term, $193-million, public-private initiative to revitalize the depressed Greenlaw-Manassas area of Memphis. A plan for the 160-block area north of the central business district, now called Uptown Memphis, was created...
The first Australian and New Zealand New Urbanism Congress held in Melbourne in late April attracted over 370 participants from six countries. The format included a two-day main “overview” congress, followed by local project tours and a two-day...
The Denver area’s first mall redevelopment is already well underway in the City of Englewood. Cinderella City, once one of the region’s premier malls, has been torn down to give way to CityCenter Englewood, a transit-oriented, walkable, mixed-use...
New urbanist principles inform a growing number of large-scale planning efforts.
For the past 10 years, the New Urbanism has been primarily defined by
individual projects, built in reaction to the reigning auto-oriented, single-use planning...