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.
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...
“Advance scouts for urban sprawl” is how one commentator characterizes public school systems in the new report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Historic Neighborhood Schools in the Age of Sprawl: Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School. At...
The Planning and Zoning Committee in Wildwood, Missouri, has given preliminary approval to a $35 million, mixed-use development as part of its new urbanist plan for Wildwood Town Center. Incorporated only five years ago, Wildwood is a rapidly...
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...
An eight mile stretch of Florida’s Panhandle is acquiring a concentration of high-quality, high-end, New Urbanism. The prototype new urbanist town of Seaside — 90 percent complete — continues to slowly develop its town center and remaining...
Underwriting and financial criteria must be changed, and permitting must be expedited, to enable new urbanist developments to compete with suburban sprawl, according to the developer of Abacoa Town Center.
All’s well that ends well, but developer...