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.
Richard McLaughlin, a Minneapolis-based architect and town planner known for his work on public-sector charrettes and for his efforts to systematize New Urbanism, died on New Year’s Eve of pancreatic cancer. He was a former principal of the Town...
Firmitas, a subsidiary of the I’On Company, is redeveloping a 32-unit apartment complex in Charlotte into a 1,000-unit, Morningside Village, which will also include 30,000 square feet of commercial space. According to the Charlotte Business Journal...
Brown University is planning to expand into the Jewelry District of Providence, Rhode Island, by purchasing seven buildings containing 232,000 square feet. Past expansion by the university on the city’s East Side often brought Brown into conflict...
In Paris, a motorist with a cellphone or a GPS navigation device will soon be able to find out whether there’s a parking garage nearby that has space available. An organization of French parking garages announced in November that approximately 120...
Six years after debuting a website that was advanced for its time, CNU has rebuilt and relaunched CNU.org to help members learn about New Urbanism, share knowledge, and stay connected. The site is designed to communicate more effectively — and more...
Michael Crosbie, the new chair of the architecture department at the University of Hartford, is adding a course on New Urbanism to the school’s curriculum. Crosbie, an architect, writer, and editor who has worked for the past 11 years at Steven...
In Cherokee County, Georgia, a 4,000-acre development is generating controversy as it winds it way through a rezoning process. The Willoughby-Sewell tract, to be developed by Stephen Macauley and being planned by EDAW, is a conservation-oriented...
Mississippi will get the lion’s share of housing designed by new urbanists; Louisiana complains.The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced in late December that it will give Louisiana $75 million and Mississippi more than $280 million for...
In the 1990s when Andres Duany made double carousel slide presentations, he used to feature a slide of the Intersection of Virginia Beach and Independence boulevards in Virginia Beach. The suburban intersection boggled the mind with 20 or more lanes...
The Driehaus Form-Based Codes Award will be presented for the first time in May at the Congress for the New Urbanism in Philadelphia. Submissions must be received by the Form-Based Codes Institute by February 28. The jury will consist of architect...
Luxury condominium developers in New York are including automatic parking garages in their projects. The driver leaves a car in a delivery bay, and a computerized system carries the vehicle to a parking spot in a structure that — thanks to the...
Ground has been broken on the fourth and final phase of Excelsior & Grand, a mixed-use town center that has given the Minneapolis suburb of St. Louis Park a new gathering place adjacent to a municipal park. The last segment of the project, being...