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.
Chicago unveiled a pedestrian safety plan (pdf) this week that includes implementation of traffic calming measures like pedestrian islands, chicanes, and midblock curb bumpouts, Streetsblog reported. The pedestrian refuge islands (photo above) have...
The photo above, by urbanist Peter Katz, was taken in the entrance to a subway station in Chicago. This is the latest strategy being tested by Peapod, an online grocery delivery service that was founded in the Chicago area and serves most of the...
China is building the entire country around the automobile — making the same mistakes the US made in the last century only faster, warns urbanist Peter Calthorpe in a startling Foreign Policy article. China will pay in social costs and pollution,...
CNU has added projects to its Freeways Without Futures list. An update to this list, published this week, highlights potential teardowns in Somerville, Massachusetts, Niagara Falls, New York, and Long Beach, California. Also the update discusses an...
A perfect Walkscore and LEED Silver certification didn't hurt the lease-up of Wallace Properties' new 107-unit apartment building in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. The Citizen of Pike Pine, which includes studios, one-bedrooms, and loft...
The old Philadelphia zoning code required one parking space per unit in multifamily residential projects — the new code adopted last week requires three spaces per 10 units, a 70 percent reduction. The demand for more parking and for pedestrian-...
The Republicans Party leadership, whose base lives mostly in automobile-dependent areas, wants all federal gas tax dollars to go toward highways — their platform says so. Cities and towns that thrive on more environmentally friendly multimodal...
A proposed redevelopment of a 240-unit public housing project called Farnam Courts has drawn criticism for an uninspiring site plan. A bigger problem may be its location, cut off from the rest of the city by a limited access highway and rail...
Complete Streets policies continue to be popular across the US, despite a provision on the issue being rescinded from the recent federal transportation bill. More than 350 US states, counties, and communities have adopted Complete Streets policies,...
Recently we received an email from the mayor of Carmel, Indiana, who touted the work that the city is doing to create urban amenities and improve the quality of life. Carmel is a typical "boomburb," north of Indianapolis — growing from 750 people in...
Portland, Oregon, is going through an apartment construction boom. Forty projects are underway, and 25 of them have no parking, according to Oregon Public Radio. No minimum parking requirements allows developers to increase density on sites and...
A cottage has been built in the Southlands, an "agrarian urbanism" development on a 538-acre tract near Vancouver, British Columbia. The unit is a prototype for pocket neighborhoods — or "cottage courtyards" — clusters of homes gathered around a...