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.
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...
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...
The City of Beaverton, Oregon, had great hopes for its transit-oriented development, the Round at Beaverton Central, but is left with a couple of building shells after construction shut down in 1999. According to the Portland Oregonian, developer...
Just as home owners can learn to improve their homes, citizens can learn to take active part in the improvement of their communities. That’s the philosophy behind Real Towns: Making Your Neighborhood Work, written by Harrison Bright Rue and...
Not since the 1940s have so many older cities enjoyed population growth. For most of our major metropolitan areas, the 1970s were a disaster. St. Louis, for example, lost a little more than a quarter of its population. A fifth of the people in...
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ) is negotiating with a major land-use law firm to disseminate new urbanist zoning codes to municipalities. Today, public planners and elected officials who want a new urbanist growth model for their...
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...