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.
Twelve mid-career professionals from a variety of disciplines have been awarded fellowships for 2005-06 in the Knight Program in Community Building, based at the University of Miami School of Architecture. In early November the group convened for...
The Congress for the New Urbanism is asking for Charter Award entries. Submissions are due by January 31. See www.cnu.org for more details. u
The Mississippi Renewal Forum provided one of the first opportunities to introduce an entire region to the SmartCode and the idea of Transect-based and form-based coding. In the weeks since the Forum ended, a number of officials along the Gulf Coast...
Transportation II. The pedestrian environment; frontages C. Dooryard & light court; forecourt; stoop
Of all the types of building frontages, the pattern known as dooryard and light court is the one demonstrating the greatest number of sophisticated variations. It was the model used in many neighborhoods, both elegant and modest, built during the...
Infill and redevelopment projects designed by new urbanists took most of the US EPA’s National Awards for Smart Growth achievement in 2005. The winner for overall excellence was the Denver Urban Renewal Authority for facilitating the redevelopment...
Las Cruces, New Mexico, has adopted a master plan that calls for restoring two-way traffic to Main Street, where business withered after six blocks were converted to a pedestrian mall in the 1970s. The New York Times reported October 12 that the 80,...
Michael Mehaffy is involved in launching a research center on “generative coding” with Christopher Alexander, in association with the Martin Centre at Cambridge University in England. Mehaffy will serve as managing director of the Centre for...
The Cornerstone town center project, which was intended to reinvigorate part of a blighted commercial strip in Parma Heights, Ohio, will likely be stripped of every aspect of New Urbanism. The McGill Property Group of Solon, Ohio, has offered to buy...
Two municipalities are showing how communities can restrict “formula retail” businesses that some contend undermine the character of established shopping districts.
Last year San Francisco adopted Planning Code Section 703.3, a provision that...
Peter Swift, who has operated a New Urbanism-oriented transportation planning firm in Longmont, Colorado, is going to Iraq as director of town planning for a firm that will carry out large development efforts in the Kurdish northern section of the...
By Joanna Lombard Rizzoli, 2005, 176 pp., hardcover $49.95. Considering the enormous impact Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk have made on town planning and urban design, it’s curious that so little has been said about the architecture...
The growing municipality of Pike Road outside of Montgomery, Alabama, approved in August a version of the SmartCode that will operate parallel to current zoning. The code was approved pending an annexation of The Waters, a large-scale TND in the...