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 small ski resort town wants to guide growth and calls in expertise from the outside.
This past February, CNU Director of Advisory Services James M. Moore and
a team of CNU members traveled to California's Sierra Nevada mountains to show how...
Home sales are brisk in Belmont Greene, a traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Loudoun County, Virginia. Master developer Waterford Development reports that 50 homes have been sold before the first model homes open this spring, and 187...
Prince George’s Metro Center, a office complex of more than one million square feet in Hyatsville, Maryland, is about to add a mixed-use town center. Plans for University Town Center include up to 1,800 apartments, 250,000 square feet of retail,...
By John A. Dutton Skira Architecture Library, Milano 2000. 223 pp., Softcover: $29.95. Just a cursory glance at this book reveals that John Dutton has put together a worthy successor to Peter Katz’ seminal The New Urbanism, published seven...
Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck will be released in paperback on April 16. $18.
As ever larger schools on the urban fringe replace historic institutions, a new report identifies public policy changes needed to save neighborhood schools.
Why is only one in eight children walking or bicycling to school these days? Why do...
“The mistake cities get caught in is having to build a ‘good business climate.’ What they have to do is build a people climate.”
—Richard Florida, professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, quoted in The...
Planning for a New Century: The Regional Agenda brings together 12 planners, urban designers, and educators to examine smart growth and livable communities. The book is edited by Jonathan Barnett, an urban designer and a professor of the Practice of...
Montgomery County, Maryland, is pursuing two transit-oriented development (TOD) projects around the Twinbrook and Shady Grove stations on the Washington DC region’s Metro system. Two charrettes, led by Design Collective, an architecture and planning...
In Costa Contra County, California, a February charrette produced a new vision for development around the Pleasant Hill BART commuter rail station. The design team included architects and town planners Lennertz Coyle & Associates, New Urbanism...
CNU has released its mall study, Greyfields into Goldfields, in which PricewaterhouseCoopers concludes that approximately 7 percent of the nation’s regional malls are greyfields, i.e., in steep decline and ripe for redevelopment. The firm...
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention turn their attention to the connection between community design and people’s level of physical activity.
For decades, health scientists have warned us that Americans are more sedentary and more obese...