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 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...
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...
In late August, CNU hosted a delegation of Chinese housing officials in San Francisco as they recruited American talent for a new enterprise: developing pedestrian-scale, mixed-use, traditional neighborhoods in the booming cities of Beijing and...
Vickery, the first complete new urbanist neighborhood proposed in the Atlanta region, is running into opposition from neighbors who object to its density. The 210-acre development in Forsythe County is proposed for a site that currently has half-...