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.
By John Nolen Introduction by Charles D. Warren University of Massachusetts Press in association with the Library of American Landscape History, 2005, 228 pp., hardcover $35
In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Orton Family Foundation will develop new planning tools and processes that coastal communities can use. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation will give the Orton Family Foundation $250,000 to introduce...
The Oregon Supreme Court in February upheld Measure 37, a law that could undo the state’s three-decade-long effort to restrict development outside urban growth boundaries. The law, approved by voters in November 2004, requires governments to let...
In a year when new urbanists are bringing historic plans and real optimism to the hurricane-hit Gulf Coast, the fourteenth annual Congress for the New Urbanism will feature four days focused on getting great plans implemented wherever they’re...
Sandy Sorlien and Jonathan Barnett spoke in a University of Pennsylvania symposium in February on “Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.” This summer Penn Press will publish a volume of the symposium papers, edited...
A design that Washington, DC, architect Milton Grenfell produced for the Mississippi Renewal Forum last October was the cover illustration for the February issue of Traditional Building. Inside the magazine was a 4,000-word feature by Period Homes...
Since 2002, Albuquerque developer Rob Dickson has completed three phases of converting the long-vacant Albuquerque High School to housing. Now his Paradigm & Company LLC is about to start the fourth and final phase, which calls for building 54...
Providence, Rhode Island, is not the kind of place that leaves its urban plans on the drawing boards. In the past 20 years, city leaders have freed the city’s riverfront from a concrete tomb, moved rail lines to the edge of downtown, and started...
Lerner Enterprises has thrown a wrench into plans by Fairfax County to add hundreds of small condominium units to part of Tysons Corner, a northern Virginia business center where 100,0000 people work but where only about 17,000 reside.
As part of...
The fifth annual New Partners for Smart Growth conference in Denver at the end of January drew the largest crowd ever for this event by a considerable margin, according to Michele Kelso Warren of the Local Government Commission (LGC) in Sacramento,...
The Avenue District and the redevelopment of the Flats may produce housing at opposite ends of downtown.
Critics of smart growth and New Urbanism love to point out that sprawl is not limited to the US or North America; it occurs across the globe. The implication is that all the world, or at least the portion that can afford it, likes living and working...