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.
Frank Gruber writes about the town he knows, Santa Monica. The narrative that emerges could be about your town or mine.
A special report released in August by the National Research Council, Driving and the Built Environment: The Effects of Compact Development on Motorized Travel, Energy Use, and CO2 Emissions — Special Report 298, estimates that compact development...
A 20-mile light-rail line from central Phoenix to Mesa and Tempe, Arizona, which opened last December, is surpassing ridership projections by more than 25 percent. The line — which initially provoked controversy because of its $1.4 billion cost, its...
The LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) program won approval in September from three of the four groups that were asked to decide whether the program should advance from pilot phase to full-scale operation.
A government commission is examining whether Charles’s architectural activism violates Britain’s rules.
In Britain, Prince Charles has often been attacked for his strong advocacy of traditional architecture and town planning. Modernists have...
Mike Lydon who left Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co in April and established a firm called The Street Plans
Mike Lydon, who left Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. in April and established a firm called The Street Plans Collaborative, has taken the lead in devising a SmartCode module that tells how to accommodate bicycling across the rural-to-urban Transect.
Houses in highly walkable neighborhoods sell for about $4,000 to $34,000 more than houses in places that offer just average levels of walkability, according to a study that Joe Cortright of Impresa Inc. conducted for CEOs for Cities. The study, “...
A City of New Orleans draft master plan recommends ripping out the elevated Interstate 10 expressway
A City of New Orleans draft master plan recommends ripping out the elevated Interstate 10 expressway that was built in the late 1960s above Claiborne Avenue — a wide boulevard that once abounded with magnificent live oak trees. Traffic would instead...
CNU members began voting on the proposed LEED for Neighborhood Development program Aug. 19 and will continue electronic balloting until Sept. 17. In a statement on the CNU website, the CNU Board and CNU’s representatives on the LEED-ND advisory...
CityPlace as a whole “appears to be surviving OK,” says Dana Little, a designer who was on the DPZ team that planned the 72-acre development in 1993.
“The explosion of interest in streetcars stalled only slightly in 2008,” according to Gloria Ohland of Reconnecting America. Interest in streetcars moderated because of the national economic contraction and because it became evident that streetcars...