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.
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...
Former West Palm Beach Mayor Nancy Graham is starting her own urban-focused development and consulting business, Urban Principles, which will have an office on Clematis Street in West Palm Beach. As mayor from 1991 to 1999, Graham focused on the...
The winners of the 2001 Charter Awards are celebrated in a 32-page booklet available from CNU. The publication shows how these 15 projects fulfilled the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism, and why the jurors picked them from the 208...
Tysons Corner in northern Virginia is one of the largest “edge cities,” with the nation’s 14th largest daytime office population and a retail concentration second only to New York City on the East Coast, according to the Washington Post. But the...
A 680-acre new urbanist development, the Village of WestClay, is also located in Carmel. Brenwick TND Communities plans for up to 1,362 residential units, including apartments, single-family dwellings on a variety of lot sizes, attached townhomes,...
A substantial amount of new construction has taken place in Olde Towne Gaithersburg, Maryland, since a new urbanist plan and urban design guidelines were adopted in the mid-1990s. Recent developments include a building with 65,000 square feet of...
NorthWest Crossing, a new urbanist project with offices, shops, civic buildings, parks, and 1,300 housing units, has been planned for Bend, Oregon. The project, designed by Walker Macy Landscape Architects and Planners and Fletcher Farr Ayotte...
The first grouping of homes around a square has been completed in Annesgrove, upstate New York’s first traditional neighborhood development. The houses in the Onondaga County project are clad in vinyl, but the developer has taken advantage of new...