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.
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...
Four smart growth awards, out of 17 total awarded by the State of Maryland, went to the City of Gaithersburg and projects in that municipality. The city won an award for its overall smart growth policy. An award was given to Market Square, the town...
Westbury, a good-looking Hope VI project, has begun construction in Portsmouth, Virginia. Hope VI is the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s nationwide program to redevelop failed public housing projects into mixed-use, mixed-income...
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...
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...
Plans for Bloomfield Park have been formally submitted to the planning department in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. The township has a building height restriction of 32 feet in its master plan, but developer Harbor Cos. proposes to build office...
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) has recently undertaken several new urbanist retrofits of conventional communities already under construction. In the firm’s first foray inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, city limits, DPZ conducted a charrette...
The path has been cleared for Atlantic Station (formerly Atlantic Steel), the $2 billion mixed-use, brownfield project in Midtown Atlanta. Demolition of the old steel mill and remediation of the site is close to complete, and with the final...
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...