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.
Laguna West, an early 1990s new urbanist development 12 miles south of downtown Sacramento, recently became a point of contention in the June 6 primary for governor of California. State Treasurer Philip Angelides, now running for the Democratic...
The Vermont legislature approved a bill establishing a “growth centers” program, which encourages development and rehabilitation in existing downtowns and village centers. The legislation expands financial incentives for property owners in centers...
The Knight Foundation has chosen the investment collaborative organization Living Cities to help guide redevelopment in the eastern section of Biloxi, Mississippi, where the homes of many low-income and minority families were destroyed or badly...
The Urban Land Institute has released a 22-page booklet titled “Principles for Temporary Communities,” based on lessons learned from the Gulf Coast hurricanes of 2005. It includes a new strategy from FEMA’s Joint Housing Solutions Center that calls...
Howard Katz, a former Knight Fellow in Community Building who worked for the Cuyahoga County treasurer’s office in Cleveland and the American Architectural Foundation in Washington, DC, will be a member of the “founding faculty” of the Charlotte...
Kenneth Hitchens was identified as being “of the Baldwin Park development” in the April 2006 article “New charrette system may bring more production builders into TNDs.” Hitchens, an independent architect, is a resident of Baldwin Park in Orlando,...
The Katrina Cottage is one of the most versatile ideas that have come out of the new urbanist Gulf Coast charrettes.
The bulk of this year’s Charter Awards from the Congress for the New Urbanism honor projects on redeveloped sites — contradicting the persistent notion that New Urbanism is mainly about building on virgin land at the suburban fringe.
Other Mississippi communities move forward with form-based codes and plans.
By the American Planning AssociationJohn Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, 736 pp., hardcover $199.
The idea of calling prefab new urbanist-designed dwellings in Louisiana “Gulf Coast Cottages” has been put to rest no more than two months after it was first raised. Andres Duany now says “Katrina” is the brand that will be used for all the cottages...
The City of Montgomery, Alabama, adopted the SmartCode by a unanimous vote of council in January. According to Chad Emerson of Faulkner University in Montgomery, and an expert on the SmartCode, Montgomery is now the second largest municipality in...