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.
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...
Despite numerous setbacks, Pulte Home Corp. is not giving up on Salamanca, the 160-acre traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Dade County, Florida. The project, the nation’s largest homebuilder’s first attempt at TND and the first test of...
Fairfax County, Virginia, supervisors approved a $100 million transit-oriented development on 58 acres at the Huntington Metro Station, the first project under the county’s new “smart growth” measure. The developers plan to build a combination of...
Local governments in Pennsylvania are encouraged to adopt traditional neighborhood development (TND) ordinances by recent revisions to the state Municipalities Planning Code (MPC). Adopted in 2000, a TND section was authored by State Rep. Robert...
New designs north of the border focus on infill and sustainability.
Canada saw rapid growth in new urbanist projects in the late 1990s, when more than 20 traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) began construction, primarily in greenfield...
Fregonese Calthorpe Associates is hired to draw a regional plan for a California county where job and population growth is outpacing the supply of housing.
Contra Costa County is feeling the pressure. The latest census revealed that the San...
“... we suppress the brashness, energy and inventiveness of local governments at our peril — even if some of those showy golf-course behomoths aren’t always to our individual liking. As a former colleague of mine, John Barnes, liked to put it,...
Weston Munzel, formerly with Gibbs Planning Group and Duany Plater-Zyberk, recently joined Woolpert LLP’s Cincinnati office as a town planner and designer, and will be working within the Facilities Planning and Design service. His responsibilities...