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.
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-...
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...
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...