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.
“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...
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...
Developers, environmentalists, Realtors, builders, planners, governors, citiizens — nearly everybody is talking about smart growth. In just three years this term has become a buzz word nationwide, a concept that makes so much sense “it’s hard to...
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...