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.
How will our suburbs look 25 years from now? Reid Ewing, a planner and professor at Rutgers University, predicts that a significant amount of new development will be new urbanist, but argues that the stronger trend will be toward the segmentation of...
Celebration, the new urbanist town in Osceola County, Florida, will soon be home to a new educational facility, a satellite campus for Stetson University. The 35,300-square-foot building is under construction on one acre near Celebration’s town...
Residential construction has begun in Mission Bay, a brownfield development that will cover more than 300 acres adjacent to San Francisco’s downtown. The Mission Housing Development Corporation is building the first complex of 100 affordable...
The Orange County, California, Council of Governments is presenting an ideas/design competition to explore ways for the county to absorb an additional 1 million residents, 300,000 housing units, and 1 million employees during the next 20 years and...
Two major ballot initiatives on growth management were defeated by voters in the November elections. In Arizona, the Sierra Club launched Proposition 202, which would have mandated that all cities, towns, and counties adopt voter-approved growth...
Avirtual city on the nternet proposed by Andres Duany to promote the New Urbanism is on hold, according to the Miami architect. The urban Transect, upon which the internet site will be based, is still not fully developed as a concept, Duany says....
Mixed-use research and academic communities in the form of traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) are among the latest design challenges facing new urbanists. Universities historically have employed great urban design on campus, and some...
A new urbanist neighborhood throws away its architectural codes to promote contemporary designs. Prospect was the first new urbanist (NU) project to get off the ground in Colorado, and now it is breaking new ground nationally with its use of...
Patience has paid off in San Jose, California, where two development projects are completed in the Jackson-Taylor neighborhood and a third is under construction. The city adopted Calthorpe Associates’ specific plan and design guidelines for the area...
HOK Planning Group, a division of Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum, Inc. (HOK), one of the world’s largest architecture firms with more than 1,800 employees worldwide, has formed the New Urban Studio. The studio is led by three experienced new urbanist...
In the year 2018, the NIMBY wars are over, consumers have learned to recognize the difference between hybrid new urbanist developments and the real thing, and typological coding has replaced conventional zoning. These and other hopeful predictions...
CNU and the movement in general generates increasingly sophisticated coverage. One way to take the pulse of the new urbanist movement is to see how we are being portrayed in major newspapers, magazines, and web sites. CNU continues to have a...