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.
The City of New Orleans is poised to invest at least $1.2 billion in reconstruction, possibly beginning as early as this April, recovery chief Edward Blakely announced March 23. “By September, we want to see cranes on the skyline,” Blakely said. The...
The City of Livermore, California approved Livermore Village, a 5.5-acre mixed-use catalyst project in their downtown. Opticos Design designed the plan and architecture in association with Thomas Dolan Architecture for Anderson Pacific, LLC.
The...
A number of recent books have come out that are of interest to new urbanists, including Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Sacred, published by ISI Books and authored by Philip Bess, professor and director of graduate...
A study in the winter issue of the Journal of American Planning Association (JAPA) tried to determine the effect that three different kinds of development exert on housing values in low-income areas of Chicago.
Alley-loaded and on-street parking can easily make new urbanist neighborhoods more than competitive with sprawl in lower-density situations. In denser center and core zones, though, the parking issue truly comes to the fore. By its basic nature,...
A 54-acre expansion of the downtown of Savannah, Georgia, extends the historic city’s connection to the Savannah River. The plan for Savannah River Landing, initiated by the city, includes a series of squares based on the city’s famous Oglethorpe...
The image to the right accompanied a March book review of Australian New Urbanism, and originally appeared in that book. Contrary to the caption in March, the authors never said the approach at the left is the “Australian ideal,” although it is well...
Jeff Speck will step down in May as director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts and return to private practice as a city planner. “I signed up for two years and ended up staying for four,” Speck said, expressing satisfaction with...
Steve Maun of Leyland Alliance LLC and Andres Duany of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company led a week-long charrette in early February that produced a design for 30 acres of waterfront land in Newburgh, New York, a distressed Hudson River city of 28,...
n Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, a 1,600-acre development called Sandy Point, part of which will feature a “new urban waterfront,” is expected to break ground in the next few months. Eagerly awaited by county and state officials, the 930-acre...
The Texas A&M University System is negotiating to place a new campus for 25,000 students in the middle of a 2,000-acre traditional neighborhood development (TND) that’s been planned for the South Side of San Antonio.
Graph title: Sharing factor
What is the difference between New Urbanism and traditional, “old” urbanism? The answer has to do with one big systemic thing — the rise of suburbia — and with one ubiquitous technical thing — the response to suburbia’...