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.
Construction began in January in Cherry Hill Village, a TND in Canton Township, Michigan. Unlike the majority of new urbanist greenfield projects, Cherry Hill Village is focused on, and will extend from, the crossroads of an existing community. The...
The Atlanta Development Authority (ADA) has broken ground on Historic Westside Village, the first publicly instigated new urbanist project in the city. The $140- million mixed-use neighborhood center is being built in the historic heart of the city’...
Six communities in the metropolitan Minneapolis/St. Paul area have been chosen as “opportunity sites” under the Smart Growth Twin Cities initiative, sponsored by the Metropolitan Council. Selected in a competitive process among 24 applicants, the...
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...
National Center for Smart Growth Research and
Education
Location: University of Maryland at College Park. Activities: Monitoring and evaluation of smart growth laws, education of public officials, research in growth management, development of...
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 early October, senior CNU members Shelley Poticha, Andres Duany, Phyllis Bleiweis, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Jonathan Rose, Victor Deupi, and Paul Murrain joined 30 of the world’s most prominent advocates of traditional town planning for an...
The New Jersey Office of State Planning has published Designing New Jersey, to encourage an informed debate on statewide design principles. The publication draws on the examples of communities planned and built in the state in the late 19th Century...
Once the social and economic cen-
ter of Montgomery County, the Washington suburb of Silver Spring has steadily declined since the early 1960s, when the migration to new suburbs siphoned housing, offices, and retail away from the urban...
The San Francisco Bay region, Charlotte, NC, and Portland, OR, are moving forward with transit villages.
If you want to see how transit will shape development in the 21st Century,
you need to look at three regions that are the current leaders...
Project New Town is the provisional name for what could become Wisconsin’s largest development with a new urbanist pattern. The project is proposed for a 430-acre greenfield site in Sun Prairie and would include 1,600 residences, retail, and a...