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.
As of early this summer, Buffalo looked like a promising site for CNU’s Highways to Boulevards initiative. Elected leaders such as Congressman Brian Higgins, a speaker at CNU’s 2006 Congress in Providence, were calling for the removal of the...
The University of Michigan Graduate Real Estate Development Program chaired by Chris Leinberger has become so popular that it’s seeking a codirector who will supplement Leinberger’s involvement. The program, spearheaded by the university’s Taubman...
Rendering caption (on page 1): Walthamstow city center in London, England, is one of many new urban plans that take inspiration from the organic, cranky street patterns of old Europe. See articles on pages 6.
In 1999, Wisconsin passed the first and only state law in the US requiring municipalities to have traditional neighborhood development codes. Eight years later — and five years after the initial deadline for adopting these ordinances — many...
Dover, Kohl & Partners led a week-long charrette in mid-September aimed at bringing order, pedestrian comfort, and a degree of architectural grace to the jumbled section of Miami containing the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine,...
Tesco, a big British supermarket chain, is planning to open at least 21 Fresh & Easy stores — most of them about 10,000 sq. ft. — in the Phoenix area, and to establish additional stores in Las Vegas, San Diego, and Los Angeles, according to The...
Sarasota County, Florida, commissioners unanimously endorsed a zoning ordinance amendment in August, establishing form-based code as an option for mixed-use, commercial development, according to the Sun newspapers. “If someone is considering whether...
Our coverage of transit-oriented development in the July-August issue contained an inaccurate figure on ridership of the Metro commuter rail system. Average daily ridership, including Saturday and Sunday, was 569,609 for the system, which serves the...
Vedanta, the largest new university in the world, will have a plan that draws from Indian spiritual traditions. On an expanse of flat rural land near the Bay of Bengal, earth-moving is to get under way this fall for an extraordinary institution....
Gulfport, Mississippi — a city with a new urban plan for redevelopment to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina — is moving to hire Memphis developer Henry Turley “as the city’s design consultant to guide citywide rebuilding in an effort...
Lenexa City Center, a 203-acre new urban center of a suburban community near Kansas City in Kansas, is making tremendous progress — despite the slowdown in the real estate market. Building permits have been issued for two mixed-use buildings...
The transportation and land-use policies of Portland, Oregon, offer residents a “green dividend” of lower commute times and costs, according to Joe Cortright, an economist with Impresa Inc. and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Average...