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.
Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburban area of nearly 1 million people bordering the nation’s capital, is considering adopting a system that would offer financial incentives and reduced impact fees to developers who build near mass transit, provide...
A page 1 article in the June 2009 issue referred to Hampton, Virginia, as a city with “little or no existing urbanism.” While mostly suburban in character, Hampton has a historic area with a grid of streets and a downtown. The city has been working...
The rural-to-urban Transect is based on the idea that there is a place for everything in the human habitat. Where elements of the built environment are in their proper place, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Through the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States developed mainly in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods. The pattern began to change with the emergence of modern architecture and zoning and the ascent of the automobile...
If the New Urbanism can be boiled down to a single idea, perhaps it would be making places walkable. But what makes pedestrians feel attracted to one place and want to avoid another?
The San Diego Smart Growth Fund, one of a number of funds devoted to smart-growth projects across the US, has succumbed to the real estate depression.
The Center City District has been systematically improving lighting for pedestrians in the core of Philadelphia since 1997. “We’re about two-thirds of the way through replacing highway-scale cobrahead light fixtures with shorter, pedestrian-scale...
Compact, mixed-use development linked to lowered greenhouse gases.
Edited by Alex Krieger and William S. SaundersUniversity of Minnesota Press, 2009, 392 pp., $25 paperback
A 25-acre organic farm in Serenbe, a new urban development about 30 miles southwest of downtown Atlanta, was the focus of a March 1 travel feature in The New York Times. The farm, established by Steve and Marie Nygren, supplies food for the...
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has begun distributing Portland: Quest for the Livable City, a 57-minute film that examines the Oregon metro area’s efforts to reduce incursions on the natural environment and grow more densely within an urban...
Traffic congestion fell in 99 of the country’s 100 largest metropolitan areas in 2008, according to Inrix, a company that studies data from vehicles equipped with GPS devices. Vehicle miles traveled (VMT) declined about 3 percent on urban interstate...