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.
During and immediately after the election President-elect Obama and his campaign made statements relating to smart growth, urbanism, and transit. Read Kaid Benfield’s blog and the t4America blog for details. In Google Blogs, search “Kaid Benfield...
CNU calls on new urbanists to review and comment — by January 5 — on the latest draft of the rating system. As the nation’s first rating system assessing green neighborhood development approaches completion, the Congress for the New Urbanism (...
New urbanist architecture and planning firm Goody Clancy began work in September on a master plan and zoning ordinance for the City of New Orleans. The plan will incorporate recommendations from the three citywide planning initiatives conducted in...
Hopes rise for location-efficient mortgages, which in limited tests have bucked the nationwide wave of bad housing debt by producing no known foreclosures.
Downtown Silver Spring, an arts, entertainment, office, and shopping complex in the formerly deteriorated heart of Silver Spring, Maryland, won this year’s Smart Growth Achievement Award for “overall excellence” from the US Environmental Protection...
Charter Awards 2009 honor the urbanism the world needs now
Where conventional sprawl generates enormous amounts of carbon emissions, erodes the bonds of community, and strains the connection between cities and the rural areas that help sustain...
The City of Stockton, California, has agreed to reduce sprawl and allow construction of 18,000 new housing units within the current city limits in an effort to address global warming, according to the Local Government Commission based in Sacramento...
New York City created an esplanade this summer on one of Manhattan’s busiest streets — Broadway from 35th to 42nd Street — by eliminating two lanes of vehicular traffic. Benches and chairs were installed on block-long stretches of the newly carved-...
The Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia has explored location-efficient mortgages and the related concept of “location-efficient development” in great detail in a chapter of the Institute’s Online TDM [Transport Demand Management...
New Urban News asked some leading new urbanists to write open letters to President-elect Barack Obama in an effort to identify a new national agenda for urbanism. In many cases, the letters were shortened significantly for print publication, but the...
Since street network connectivity affects all new urbanist projects (and too many good projects are held back by a lack of traditional urban street grids beyond their borders), both individual urbanists and the overall movement will benefit from CNU...
Its impact will partly depend on yet-to-be-determined greenhouse gas reduction targets for new development.