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 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...
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...
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...
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...