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.
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...
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...
Facilitated by a number of start-up businesses and organizations, car-sharing is starting to become available in urban centers around the US, according to USA Today. Cooperatives and car-sharing companies now operate in Boston; Seattle; San...
Urban redevelopment continues to gain momentum in Milwaukee. Beer Line B, a project going up on a former brownfield site on the Milwaukee River, now has 480 new homes completed or under construction. “The area has a flavor of San Francisco, with...
Joe Alfandre, former developer of new urbanist projects Kentlands and Belmont Forest, has been chosen as the co- executive director of the National Town Builders Association (NTBA) in Washington, DC. Neil Takemoto, who served as the executive...
The Urban Land Institute, whose members consist of the developers who have built suburbia in the last six decades, now recommends that conventional strip centers be converted to urban places. The “reinvention” of commercial strip development can...
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...
Ridenour is one of the few large-scale developments planned in partnership with an environmental group. The goal was to “create a mixed-use community that would adhere to the principles of Georgia Conservancy’s ‘Blueprints for Successful Communities...