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.
Some of the British press reported that the work in Jamaica by the Prince’s Foundation would produce “a little slice of Poundbury” in a blighted Caribbean locale. That’s true in one sense: The Foundation is fostering a community that employs...
Beyond economy-wide pricing measures, land use strategies are the most effective long-term way to cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to the report’s authors, Cambridge Systematics.
Over the last few years, CNU’s annual transportation summit has become one of the nation’s top forums for advancing highly-connected, multimodal transportation networks.
The University of Utah has established a new professional education program, the Mountain West Planning and Design Academy. Reid Ewing, a well-known researcher in the smart growth field, will guide the program with Chris Arthur and Robert Young. The...
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...
The Reburbia contest by Dwell magazine and Inhabitat.com, a design competition for reinventing the suburbs, is one clear case where the people are smarter than the experts. The most online votes, by a wide margin, were cast for the “Urban Sprawl...
As part of its ongoing Emergency Response and Street Design Initiative, The Congress for the New Urbanism is proposing changes to the International Fire Code that will empower local fire code officials to be more flexible on street designs. These...
New Urban Free Agents, sponsored by the New Urban Guild, is a network of free-agent planners, architects, and designers who have worked within the New Urbanism. “Almost all architecture and design firms have been laying off employees since the...
A four-year effort to place the city of Miami under a new urbanist zoning system failed in August when the City Commission deadlocked on the proposal, known as “Miami 21.” However, the code, which was formulated under the guidance of Duany Plater-...
This month, Vancouver, British Columbia, will begin allowing developers to build condominium units that include “secondary suites” — living quarters that can operate independent of the main portion of each condo. A condo owner could use the...