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 American Planning Association has come out with its Cities in Transition: A Guide for Practicing Planners, a 165-page large-format paperback on strategies for dealing with struggling cities. The report focuses much of its attention on what it...
The Downtown Crossing plan in New Haven received unanimous approval from the city's Board of Aldermen despite critics, including many urbanists, who claimed that it will gobble up enormous public funds ($35 million, including a $16 million TIGER...
Doug Boone, a pioneering new urban developer in the Charlotte, North Carolina, region, died August 2. Boone injected urbanism in a suburban town and opened up the planning process to the public with his New Neighborhood project in the town of...
In the book Design After Decline, Brent D. Ryan examines two of America’s toughest cases—Detroit, which lost more than 150,000 housing units between 1950 and 2000, and North Philadelphia, which in the same period hemorrhaged more than 300,000...
The Economics of Place, a book published by the Michigan Municipal League, makes the case that placemaking is key to the economic revival of the state — and, indeed, the nation. Better! Cities & Towns reviews this book in detail in the July-...
The last few days, I’ve spent some time in la belle province, and I’ve felt that the Ville de Montréal is a great teacher.
A referendum to impose a penny per dollar sales tax to raise billions for transportation over 10 years was defeated by Atlanta voters this week after it was opposed by an unlikely coalition of Tea Party members, environmentalists, and the NAACP. The...
More than 360,000 New Yorkers have a severe visual impairment, and some of them feel threatened by the city's growing number of bike lanes and pedestrian plazas, The New York Times says. Groups like Lighthouse International and the PASS Coalition ...
Make the transit experience a thing of joy, advises Darrin Nordahl, author of Island Press's ebook Making Transit Fun: How to Entice Motorists from Their Cars (and Onto Their Feet, a Bike, or Bus). “Joy helps transit compete against the allure of...
In 2003, in Washington’s Logan Circle, Gina Schaefer opened what she believes was the first new neighborhood-scale hardware store in the nation’s capital in 20 years. Since then, she’s opened six more in other Washington neighborhoods (see photo...
Retailers are heading to the cities and they’re often willing to break all the rules they had previously imposed on their operations to do so, according to a detailed story in the July-August 2012 issue of Better! Cities & Towns. Multi-story...