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.
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...
Landscape architect David Yocca and his firm Conservation Design Forum of Elmhurst, Illinois, have been hired to design a new urbanist community on an 831-acre site in the small town of Plano, about 50 miles from downtown Chicago. Yocca has...
The third phase of Heritage at Freemason Harbour, an infill development in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, was recently completed. The project now has 184 apartments and a one-block main street, which includes a 3,000 square foot grocery store....
Ellen Dunham-Jones was hired to direct the architecture program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Dunham-Jones, a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, is leaving her position as associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts...
The planning director in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently urged the City Council to exert greater control over growth in this rapidly expanding metropolitan area. Martin Cramton recommended that the city create mixed-use zoning districts around...
If CNU has its way, developers of the future will be building mixed-income, mixed-use projects as a matter of course. When that day comes, they may look back at a September 2000 meeting at the Seaside Institute in Seaside, Florida, as a seminal...
CNU recently held a landmark meeting with officials from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC). It was the first time that the mall industry has met with advocates and developers over the growing issue of failing shopping centers,...
The Sierra Club’s publication Smart Choices or Sprawling Growth: A 50-State Survey of Development marks the first time the leadership of a major environmental group has endorsed specific development projects and examined not only the location of...
Denver infill development is the first of its kind.
The first cohousing community built as part of a traditional neighborhood development broke ground in Denver, Colorado, in October. Hearthstone, a 33-unit cohousing project on 1.6 acres, will be...
Federal Small Business Administration loans support sprawl, according to a lawsuit filed by environmentalists. Friends of the Earth and the Forest Conservation Council analyzed SBA loans in the Washington, DC, area during the last three years and...
One of the basic tenets of new urbanist planning is to establish an open street grid that promotes the free flow of pedestrian and automobile traffic. But what if a closed street has become a haven for pedestrians? Should the need for...