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.
Mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented town centers offered by the New Urbanism could be attractive to Fortune 500 companies, according to Robert Tiscareno of LMN Architects, which designed Redmond Town Center in Redmond, Washington. The project originally...
Companies affiliated with the Mormon Church are planning a traditional neighborhood development in Kansas City, Missouri, to fulfill the city’s land use plan advocating mixed-use, high density development patterned after new urbanist plans in other...
n The Wharton Real Estate Review recently featured essays by new urbanists Andres Duany, Robert Davis, Laurie Volk, Todd Zimmerman, and Witold Rybczynski. Copies of Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 1998 can be obtained directly from the Samuel Zell and...
New grants fund projects by new urbanist designers.
A recent round of $507 million in grants confirms that the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is committed to revitalizing public housing using
new urbanist principles....
Setting up a legal framework for a mixed use town center may require the developer to look at malls for inspiration.
Town center is by far the most complex part of a traditional neighborhood development (TND), where the mixed uses converge in a...
Northwest Landing, a traditional neighborhood development near Tacoma, Washington, is outdistancing its competitors by a long margin. From January to September, 101 homes were sold in the project, compared to 58 in Russellwood, the next best selling...
Residents of Kentlands, the Gaithersburg, Maryland, TND, took control of their destiny with regards to Midtown, the town center. The developer, Guy Beatty, wanted to build a 180,000 square foot Target superstore — claiming that a smaller, pedestrian...
CNU’s Task Forces have taken an active role this year planning our annual Congress. CNU VII: The Wealth of Cities will be held in Milwaukee, June 3-6, 1999. The Task Force Chairs are meeting in San Francisco this month to help cull through the many...
Federal money finally came through to begin construction of Del Paso Nuevo, a 150-acre new urbanist neighborhood in Sacramento, California. Designed by Jeff Townsend of Vail Engineering, Del Paso Nuevo was one of the first Homeownership Zones...
The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) responded quickly to two recent attacks on sprawl, one by Vice President Al Gore and the other by the Sierra Club (both are reported in this issue of New Urban News). Perceiving that its industry is...
The Pritzker Prize, “the Nobel of architecture,” is generally a glorification of modern architectural achievements. This year, at a White House presentation of the prize, the nation’s architectural elite was treated to an overview of what went wrong...
The I’On Builders Guild was created by the developers of I’On, a traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. The guild is a screening and educational system for builders and home designers in the 243-acre project....