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 development of housing and shops at Fort Belvoir in northern Virginia reveals some of the differences between how New Urbanism operates in a civilian setting and how it works on military bases. Herryford Village, the first completed portion of a...
After many years on the drawing boards and in permitting, Haymount in Caroline County, Virginia, is preparing for rapid development, according to developer John Clark. The first building, a wastewater treatment plant designed by Washington, DC,...
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...
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...
Some municipalities in hot climates, such as Miami, are replacing that symbol of tropical paradise — the palm tree — with other, leafier trees. The objective is to provide a tree canopy that will shade the sidewalks and make pedestrians more...
Robert Sitkowski has moved from Chicago back to the Robinson & Cole law firm in Hartford, where he is focusing on land-use law for developers, land owners, municipalities, and advocacy groups and on legal aspects of Smart Growth and New Urbanism.
Architect Victor Deupi has taken a leave of absence from teaching at the University of Notre Dame’s architecture school to become Arthur Ross Director of Education at the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America in New York.