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.
The New Urbanism certainly has strong implications for planners, architects, traffic engineers, developers and the entire real estate industry. But its political ramifications are relatively unexplored. That may change, according to a column in the...
To date, CNU primarily has focused on creating and building an organization.
Former Congress for the New Urbanism executive director Peter Katz has launched a firm, Urban Advantage, to promote well-designed developments and improvements in the public realm. “We’re a full service consultancy promoting the inherent benefits of...
The City of Redmond, Washington, sprawling suburb and home of Microsoft Corp., almost had a four-anchor enclosed regional mall, planned and approved in the l980s. The 1989 bankruptcy of a major tenant intervened. When the project resurfaced in 1992...
Twenty-four foot wide streets are the safest, according to a study by Swift and Associates and the City of Longmont, Colorado. The study, Residential Street Typology and Injury Accident Frequency, looked at 20,000 automobile accident reports over an...
I’On, a traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (in the last issue, I’On was incorrectly identified as being in North Carolina), now has a journal. The inaugural issue of Civitas: the I’On Journal, was printed in...
After much controversy, the Town of Port Royal, South Carolina, approved a Traditional Town Code based on a master plan by Dover, Kohl & Partners of South Miami, Florida. The mandatory code applies to a 245-acre, largely historic central part of...
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) met in October to promote walkable neighborhoods and encourage multimodal transportation investments. CNU was represented, along with the Local Government Commission, Surface Transportation Policy Project, EPA,...
Post Properties announced that it completed its acquisition of Columbus Realty Trust (see September/October issue of New Urban News). Post and Columbus are publicly traded real estate investment trusts (REIT) specializing in apartment buildings....
In 1748, Giovanni Battista Nolli finished a 12-year project creating a vertical projection plan of Rome. The two-dimensional plan showed all areas accessible to the public — streets, piazzas, courtyards, interiors of cathedrals and other public...
A failed regional mall in Winter Park, Florida, was the subject of a redesign charrette in May, 1997. The consultants — Dover, Kohl & Partners, Gibbs Planning Group and Glatting Jackson Anglin Lopez Rinehart — proposed a two-step transformation...
Researchers determine that good urban design is the reason why consumers are willing to pay more to live in the Gaithersburg neotraditional project.
A recent George Washington University study shows that consumers are willing to pay $30,000 to $...