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.
Milt Rhodes in Raleigh, North Carolina, who in 2006 established New Urban Water Works to develop innovative stormwater management plans for communities, recently started another business. His Carolina Cottage Company designs and builds very small...
The Office of Sustainable Development in Portland, Oregon, has decided that one of the best ways to cut down on greenhouse-gas emissions is by fostering what it calls the “20-minute neighborhood.”
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(All graphs are: (Residential land value per SF x Density (Units per Acre)
Studies of transit-oriented development show that rising materials...
The Hercules, California, City Council approved a new urbanist conceptual plan July 22 that calls for construction of 1,224 housing units, 42,000 sq. ft. of retail, 81,000 sq. ft. of offices, and 134,000 sq. ft. of flex space on 42 acres of the city...
On August 21 NPR reported on a steel mill that is being converted to a town center at the interestion of state routes 29 and 202 in Malvern, Pennsylvania. The 100-acre Uptown Worthington, now under construction, is planned to include 745,000 square...
“Hybrid Coding” is explored in the May issue of the American Planning Association’s periodical Zoning Practice. Author Arista Strungys, a planner at Camiros Ltd., writes that replacing a conventional zoning code with a form-based code may be too...
Only 3 percent of home buyers expressed a willingness to give up proximity to public transportation in today’s market, according to a recent poll by Builder magazine. More buyers (6 percent) are willing to give up proximity to shopping and/or work....
Photo caption 1: DPZ Town Planning Director Gahlina Tahchieva leads an open-source session on suburban retrofits at CNU XVI.
Emily Talen won this year’s award for best article in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, for her analysis, “New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding in Mississippi.” Talen, a planning professor at...
The draft plan for meeting greenhouse gas reductions falls short, according to urbanists, but support is growing for more aggressive measures.
Environmental, housing, development, and land use organizations have joined a chorus of groups calling...
Edited by Douglas Kelbaugh and Kit Krankel McCulloughRoutledge (Taylor & Francis), 2008, 424 pp., $44.95 paperbackIn this long and often abstruse collection of writings on urbanism, one essay stands out as a marvel of imagination and observation...
El Paso, Texas, approved the SmartCode in late July as an optional alternative to the city’s conventional zoning and subdivision codes. With a population of 609,000, El Paso is believed to be the largest city in the US to have adopted the SmartCode...