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.
Montebello Village is a 36-acre TND designed at a recent charrette and scheduled to break ground this fall in Greenville, South Carolina. The design by Alberto & Associates of Haddonfield, New Jersey, with architect David Mayernik, proposes 110...
Lennertz Coyle Associates of Portland has begun planning the first new urbanist community in Wyoming on the site of a 329-acre ranch in Teton County. The county has purchased the site with the goal of reducing the deficit of affordable housing in...
The planning commission in Woodford County, Kentucky, recently approved both a plan for a TND extension of Versailles, the county’s biggest town, and a proposed industrial park, also with new urbanist design.
Arcadia Realty hired Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to help design North Richland Hills Town Center, which is in the early stages of construction. The laboratory advised the developer and planner on the best ways to reduce heat retention in...
The nation’s largest urban redevelopment has broken ground and construction of homes and retail begins this fall. The sheer size of Stapleton explodes previous notions of new urbanist infill. The site of Denver’s old airport covers 4,700 acres...
Community by Design: New Urbanism for Suburbs and Small Communities joins a long list of books extolling the virtues of mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented neighborhood planning. This book, by landscape architects Kenneth Hall and Gerald Porterfield,...
Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) takes a new urbanist approach with its planned Santa Monica, California, workplace. The NRDC wants to make its 15,000 sq. ft. building a showcase — not just environmentally, but also in terms of...
The new economy may have foundered, but most new urbanists report that they are as busy as ever. Though growth has slowed in the national economy, internet firms have crashed, industrial output has declined, and the stock market has floundered,...
“Since 1982, while the US population has grown nearly 20 percent, the time Americans spend in traffic has jumped an amazing 236 percent. ... The average driver now spends the equivalent of nearly a full work week each year stuck in traffic. That’s...
Sarasota County in Florida has hired the Orlando planning and consulting firm Glatting Jackson to lead a team of advisors that will flesh out the details of the county’s Resource Management Area (RMA) approach to future growth. The incentives-based...
Recent developments in the Washington, DC, area demonstrate a variety of techniques for placing a large grocery store in a mixed-use urban environment. Of all the big box store types, supermarkets are the most common, are used most frequently by...
The Congress for the New Urbanism prefaced its ninth annual congress with a daylong series of lectures and discussions by luminaries in the new urbanist (NU) movement. “New Urbanism 101” was designed to give an overview of NU history and principles...