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.
Collier County, Florida, has commissioned new urbanists Dover, Kohl & Partners to create a Community Character Plan for the 2,025 square mile county. The year long plan began with a charrette in April, 2000, and involves as many as 15 study...
Construction began on the town center of King Farm, a new urbanist project in Rockville, Maryland. The town center will include 125,000 square feet of retail, including a Safeway supermarket, smaller shops and restaurants, and apartments above the...
Mason Run, a 55-acre new neighborhood in Monroe, Michigan, recently went under construction on the site of a former paper mill. The city acquired the mill and sold off a portion to Crosswinds Communities, which hired Urban Design Associates of...
Ground has been broken for the commercial town center in Park DuValle, the neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, built through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope VI program. The 25,000- square-foot town center will include retail...
“New Hampshire needs to develop a New Urbanism,” states Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Howard in a position paper on sprawl. Howard’s platform includes calls for reassessing zoning codes, reusing vacant buildings, paying more attention 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...
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...