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.
“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...
No hurdles in sight for the passage of a code that 60 of the state’s largest cities and towns must adopt by 2002.
Wisconsin is the first state in the nation to attempt to set statewide standards for traditional neighborhood development (TND).
Holt & Haugh, developers of Fairview Village in Fairview, Oregon, bought out their equity partners in the Chinook Way Apartments, a 124-unit apartment development within the village. The apartments were slow to absorb during the first six months...
Do you need help convincing fire officials that narrow neighborhood streets can accommodate fire engines and other emergency vehicles? One avenue is the new video Walkable Streets and the Fire Department put out by the Local Government Commission in...
More regional planning needed; developments are valuable as models.
Leading new urbanists gathered in Charleston this spring for the first organized attempt to critique new urbanist built work. Designers and developers presented eight projects,...
The first major juried awards focusing solely on new urbanist design demonstrate the breadth of the trend.
No Seasides or Celebrations are to be found among the winners of the first
annual Charter Awards, announced by the Congress for the New...
Professor Victor Deupi’s fourth-year architecture students at Notre Dame University recently participated in a home design competition for I’On, a 243-acre TND in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Pella Windows Corporation provided the $1000 prize...
New interactive site provides a wealth of information.
The CNU website, CNU.org, went through a transformation at the end of
April. It now has a new look and contains many times more information than ever before. The new site is designed to...
Houston’s Main Street is getting a face-lift, to create a transit-oriented environment in preparation for coming light rail. In 1999, Mayor Lee Brown created the Main Street Coalition, a public/private partnership, for the purpose of transforming...