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.
Darrin Nordahl’s Making Transit Fun! and Daniel Solomon’s Bedside Essays for Lovers (of Cities) are a series’ first two titles.
A decade into the plan, street life emerges on the suburban corridor in Arlington, VA — and an expanded code and streetcar are in the works.
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.
Forty years ago this July the first stage of demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis was completed — a seminal moment in the history of modern architecture and planning.
Some lessons from the big Denver development where New Urbanism and conventional traffic engineering collide.
The homebuilding bust has upended national chains’ strategy of growing in the distant suburbs.
One effect of the growing popularity of urban living, at least in New York, is a shrinkage in the size of studio apartments. A source quoted by The New York Times says efficiency apartments in new rental buildings now tend to be close to 400 square...
Twenty-two municipalities in the Copenhagen area are teaming up to create 26 of what they unfortunately call bicycle "superhighways"—a term that unwittingly pays homage to the 20th-century roads that made sprawl possible on a gigantic scale. But...
The US military may retreated from Vietnam in 1973, but nearly 40 years later American-style sprawl seems to have taken over, reports Michael Mehaffy in Urban Land. The southeast Asian country is growing rapidly, and many of the new developments...
California Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation Wednesday authorizing $5.8 billion to start building a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to the San Francisco area. David Siders of The Sacramento Bee reported that the initial sum is made up of...
Pedestrians may have to cross five lanes of traffic, without a refuge, if the Rt. 34 expressway replacement in New Haven, Connecticut, is built as the City now proposes. Safe-streets advocates are upset that two traffic islands, which seemed to be...
The polarization that America is experiencing in its politics also afflicts debates of architectural style, Craig Williams says in guest commentary in Washington Business Journal. "Architectural discourse should be wiser than "either/or," asserts...