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.
“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...
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.
By Jeff MapesOregon State University Press, 2009, 288 pp., $19.95Seeking to alter decades of entrenched and outmoded transportation policies, an increasingly diverse coalition of progressive citizen-activists, planners, advocacy groups,...
A 90- to 100-room hotel planned for Southern Village, a traditional neighborhood development in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has been shelved in response to neighborhood concerns, according to the Herald-Sun newspaper. “Although some Southern...
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...
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...
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