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.
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-...
The Tucson new urbanist community pushes forward in the wake of a builder pullout, a search for a new development partner, and mixed reviews from local environmentalists.
As Kermit the Frog would say, it ain’t easy being green. That’s the case...
One of the fastest growing municipalities in Arizona, Prescott Valley has changed from entirely rural to suburban in the last two decades, and has never had a downtown. Now, public officials in Prescott Valley are following a nationwide trend to...
Builders in Cherry Hill Village, Canton Township, Michigan, were prepared to use vinyl siding throughout most of their 350-acre traditional neighborhood development. Architectural codes were drafted by designer Looney Ricks Kiss governing the use...
The website will have New Urbanism resources and portals to other sites.
Avirtual city has been proposed to promote New Urbanism (NU) via the Internet. The suggested name is Izbal, after a mythical Mayan city (this name is not final, and there...
Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, for the past 25 years, was selected to receive the $100,000, first annual J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development from the Urban Land Institute. Riley has overseen a substantial...
Voters in Clearwater, Florida, rejected (58 percent to 42 percent) a plan to revitalize their downtown using new urbanist principles. The $300 million project by developer George de Guardiola would have brought 320,000 square feet of retail, a 250-...
The Regional City, a new book from Peter Calthorpe, will be in book stores in October. The book is co-authored by William Fulton, president of the Ventura, California, Solimar Research Group and editor of the newsletter California Planning and...
Prospect, a traditional neighborhood development in Longmont, Colorado, has opened its first commercial building. The 10,500-square-foot building is fully leased and houses a post office, several professional offices, and a cafe. In addition to...
Hercules, California, the former site of a massive dynamite works, has grown from about 300 to 26,000 residents in the last quarter century. The conventional suburban municipality has no downtown.
Developers and designers are exploring ways to incorporate vinyl siding into human-scale neighborhoods without destroying the streetscape.
Vinyl siding is being used innovatively in a few newurbanist projects around the country to improve the...
Change in land use practice takes time. It is frustrating to watch an innovative development move forward at a glacial pace, or to see a handful of municipalities adopt new urbanist planning codes — while knowing that mixed-use neighborhoods remain...