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.
More than 100 people now reside in Courtside Village, a TND in Santa Rosa, California. Between 30 and 40 percent of the project’s 350 single family homes have been built, and designer Alan Cohen reports that the newly completed alley homes have...
The city of Syracuse, New York, and the surrounding Onondaga County now have a new urbanist plan to guide growth over the next 20 years. On October 13, Andres Duany presented the results of a week-long charrette to the public. One of the first...
Duany Plater Zyberk & Company, Miami, 1999. Plastic cover, 74 pp. (11" x 17"), $99. The Lexicon can only be ordered direct: 305-644-1021. Most active new urbanists have seen bits and pieces of The Lexicon of the New Urbanism. Anyone who has...
Nothing can be built unless it is financed, and that is why it is urgent that lenders become educated about the New Urbanism. A Wharton School study (preliminary findings were reported in the last issue of New Urban News) identified significant...
Garage building is no longer a free-for-all in Portland, Oregon. The City Council unanimously passed an ordinance consisting of five new regulations that limit the amount of garage area allowed on the front and side of single family houses, row...
The General Services Administration, the primary building space provider for federal agencies, seeks to support smart growth.
GSA’s Center for Urban Development and Livability held its first national meeting in Washington, DC, in September....
The former site of a state mental hospital near downtown Northamp-ton, Massachusetts, will become a new urbanist project called The Village at Hospital Hill. The master plan by Calthorpe Associates envisions a commercial district on the project’s...
Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a new plan to revitalize its languishing downtown, where office and retail vacancy rates both top 15 percent. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the Alvarado project is unusual because it is financed primarily by a...
Groundbreaking is underway at San Elijo Ranch, a 640-acre new urbanist project in San Diego, California. The developer will start with a substantial town center, including 224,000 square feet of retail and 767 residential units. The town center will...
NUN: What, in your opinion, are the most important trends in retail at the moment, and which of those have a particular impact on new urbanist retail?
Gibbs: The hottest trend in retailing now is to build what the chains call lifestyle shopping...
Live/work units, an updated version of the old live-above-the-shop storefront, now are built or under construction in a handful of new urbanist projects. Units are built or under construction at Vermillion in Huntersville, North Carolina, Kentlands...
Until very recently, retail has been a mostly unrealized dream of the New Urbanism. The promise of integrating residential and commercial uses is an essential ingredient in the recipe for traditional neighborhood development (TND), but few new...