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.
Review of The Very Hungry City: Urban Energy Efficiency and the Economic Fate of Cities, by Austin Troy, Yale University Press, 2012, 384 pp., $28 hardcover
Review of Intelligent Cities, edited by Susan C. Piedmont-Palladino, National Building Museum, 2011, 120 pp., $25 paperbound.
Review of Designing Healthy Communities, by Richard J. Jackson with Stacy Sinclair, Jossey-Bass, 2011, 261 pp., $50 hardcover.
As communities seek to fix broken real estate economies, new building prototypes that can both repair damaged urban fabric and garner financing are needed.
What would cities be like if Americans started occupying remnants of the global shipping system?
Installation of streetcars, and the use of special assessment districts to support them, have been inspired by the phenomenal success of the Portland Streetcar.
Rental options will drive the early phases of residential construction as value is built for for-sale opportunities in the future.
The overall trend is toward a more place-based, character-based legal environment, according to one of the authors of the Codes Study.
After a light rail line was cancelled by Mayor Dave Bing in December, private investors and US DOT refused to give up on the idea. A scaled-down version has been proposed.
The Inner Loop is a 2.75-mile-long freeway that put a noose around the downtown of Rochester, New York.
The US Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the availability of $110 million in grants to transform public and assisted housing and to revitalize communities.
Thirteen cities received Choice Neighborhoods planning grants from US Housing and Urban Development on Tuesday.