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.
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...
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...
Research tells us that CO2 from transportation is the result of a location’s accessibility to major destinations and the design characteristics of an area. Thus, both where development goes and how it is designed matter.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Environmental Health released a major policy statement in late May calling for communities to be designed to facilitate physical activity, especially among children. About 17 percent of American...
Despite the improvement in the fortunes of many urban centers in the past decade, the Brookings Institution says “employment steadily decentralized between 1998 and 2006: 95 out of 98 metro areas saw a decrease in the share of jobs located within...
“The Story of Sprawl,” a two-DVD set of historic films ranging from Lewis Mumford’s The City, produced in 1939, to No Time for Ugliness, produced by the American Institute of Architects in 1965, has been released by Planetizen at $29.99. Viewers can...
After 5 years, Dhiru Thadani “disbanded” the Washington, DC, Town Planning Studio of Ayers/Saint/Gross, explaining that the firm no longer supports his approach to traditional town planning. The studio won 4 CNU Charter Awards and 3 AIA Chapter...
Mixed-use development at the Columbia Town Center in Columbia, Maryland, and at Cottonwood Mall in Holladay, Utah, is being delayed by the depressed economy and by the bankruptcy filing of the Chicago-based owner, General Growth Properties (GGP)....