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.
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...
“Any city is basically an oil well or a coal mine — it’s sitting on energy,” Douglas Foy, secretary of commonwealth development under former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, told a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference in late April. “Any...
At the Regional Plan Association’s Regional Assembly in New York in April, New Urban News ran into Jebediah Reed, the young journalist who recently established the website The Infrastructurist. Reed says he envisions the site as an accessible place...
Frank Greene, town architect since 2005 for the Rosemary Beach development in the Florida Panhandle, has a new firm, Element 5 Studio LLC, based in Rosemary Beach and providing architectural, interior design, and community services. His partners...
John Anderson and his partner David Kim are now working as consultants and/or developers on “a constellation of small infill projects” in Chico, California. Formerly of New Urban Builders, they started a new firm, Anderson/Kim Architecture + Urban...
The Town of Davidson, about a half-hour north of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, is steering a middle course.
By Léon Krier, edited by Dhiru A. Thadani and Peter J. Hetzel
If you’ve never read Léon Krier, you’ve missed a tremendous pleasure.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported April 22 that the redevelopment of a 28-acre former industrial site into the Glenwood Park neighborhood has been largely successful. For being new, it feels old-fashioned, says resident Abbie Gulson, in a “Can...
The National Charrette Institute released an educational DVD useful for charrette sponsors. NCI Charrette System: Stories of Community Transformation gives day-by-day accounts of recent community planning charrettes in Fort Myers, Florida; Ocean...
CNU calls on new urbanists to review and comment on the latest draft of the rating system by June 14.
Yaromir Steiner explains four important rules for regional urban centers:
Rendering 1 caption (appears on page 1): A design for courtyard housing in Santa Fe, see story on page 9.