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.
A 10,000 sq. ft., two-story mixed-use building has replaced an abandoned gas station at the gateway to historic Beaufort, South Carolina. Offices and retail stores face the street, while five loft apartments occupy the second floor of the building,...
Urban Parks Institute, a program of Project for Public Spaces, has developed the website http://urbanparks.org/ to provide information and resources on revitalizing urban public spaces.
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
Rotary, circle, and circus identify urban spatial elements associated with circular traffic movement. The first tends to occur towards the Rural end of the Transect, the last towards...
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...
Van Meter Williams Pollack of San Francisco has hired Kevin Gardiner, an urban designer formerly with Malcom Carpenter Associates.
A new group, Pennsylvania Association of New Urbanists, has begun meeting. Among the members are state Rep. Robert Freeman, who authored a traditional neighborhood development section to the state Municipalities Planning Code, town planners Thomas...
A Seaside historic district? The oldest buildings in the first new urbanist town are only 20 years old, but the idea is not as absurd as it sounds, according to attorney Doris Goldstein, who advises the Seaside Development Company. The earliest...
In Atlanta — as in most US metropolitan areas — traffic congestion is getting far worse, imposing real costs on every driver, according to a recent New York Times editorial by Paul Krugman. Moreover, commuters who drive to work during the city’s six...
Gondolier Press has released The Forgotten Child: Cities for the Well-Being of Children, by Henry L. Lennard and Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard. The book explores the failure of the modern city to provide a suitable habitat for its children. Contact...