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.
In Portland, Oregon, the Westside Max light rail line opened in September, 1998, and looks like a big success. Just two weeks after the 18-mile, $800 million line opened, light rail ridership in Portland was 22 percent above projections. Part of the...
The biggest redevelopment to date of a suburban shopping center into a mixed-use neighborhood may break ground in the spring of 1999 in San Jose, California. Federal Realty Investment Trust, based in Bethesda, Maryland, plans 1,200 residential units...
An Environmental Forum at the fall Board meeting of the Congress for the New Urbanism brought representatives of leading environmental groups together with CNU officials. The participants examined common interests and points of contention between...
CNU recently received funding from the Surdna Foundation to support efforts to mobilize a constituency of critical mass for new urbanist approaches to urban revitalization. Two key projects have been funded: the Implementation Task Force will look...
Vice President Al Gore has joined the ranks of many politicians, including both Republicans and Democrats, who are starting to recognize the benefits of traditional community design. In a speech to the Brookings Institution on September 2, Gore...
What does it take to get a traditional neighborhood development (TND) approved? The answer may be different in every municipality, but in Chesterton, Indiana, a favorable legal framework, educated municipal planners, and a determined developer all...
As of late 1998, only about 20,000 people live in new urbanist communities. The movement is still very young, yet strong anecdotal evidence suggests that the New Urbanism encourages social interaction to a far greater degree than conventional...
Nine years after it was designed, Playa Vista, a large-scale new urbanist project in Los Angeles, is under construction. But the legal troubles that have plagued the project are not over. Lawsuits by local environmentalists held Playa Vista up for...
Inner City Task Force members are working with HUD to put together another program to train public housing officials in new urbanist design. It will be modeled after the successful Harvard seminar led by CNU in 1996.
CNU’s Charter Book is up and running, once again. Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick of Fountainhead Communications have recently been hired as editors of this forthcoming book elaborating on the Charter of the New Urbanism. We hope to have the...
The Charter of the New Urbanism states that “civic, institutional and commercial activity should be embedded in neighborhoods and districts, not isolated in remote, single-use complexes. Schools should be sized and located to enable children to walk...
As defined by New Urban News, TNDs generally include an interconnected networks of streets and blocks, a clear neighborhood center (or centers, in the case of large projects), a mix of uses and housing types, a compact form, and pedestrian-oriented...