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 federal government has pledged $2.5 million for road improvements in Storrs, Connecticut, as part of a plan for developing a mixed-use center adjoining the main campus of the University of Connecticut. The local Mansfield Downtown Partnership...
Schools for Successful Communities: An Element of Smart Growth, was published in September 2004 by the Council of Educational Facility Planners International in cooperation with the US Environmental Protection Agency. “It explains why and how...
An estimated 200,000 evacuees from New Orleans settled in the Baton Rouge area in late August, straining the resources of the principal local government — the consolidated City of Baton Rouge and Parish of East Baton Rouge, which had a population of...
The Urban Land Institute is going nationwide with a program that should make it easier for smart growth and new urban projects to win the governmental approvals they need.
Within the past three years, ULI has taken the lead in forming two regional...
Mission Meridian Village, a collection of 67 varied housing units along the Gold Line light-rail tracks in South Pasadena, California, opened in June and is expected to be completed and fully occupied by September.
The benefits promised by New Urbanism spring directly from its emphasis on walking as the main way of moving through the world. Where places are made genuinely walkable, private vehicle mileage likely will be reduced and public transit will...
The first houses are under construction at Villebois, a TND in Wilsonville, Oregon. Developer Costa Pacific Homes, which built the acclaimed Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon, has gone to great lengths to secure federal funds for environmental...
Developers are increasingly replacing the skin on dull postwar office buildings and converting the interiors to condominium apartments to meet downtown housing demands, The New York Times reported July 6. Since many 1950s and 1960s office buildings...
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have created the Governors’ Institute on Community Design, modeled on NEA’s highly successful Mayors’ Institute for Community Design.
The Governors’ Institute...
A paper from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, “Terrorism, Transit and Public Safety: Evaluating the Risks,” analyzes the overall safety of public transit, taking into account all risks, including recent terrorist attacks. The study by...
New Haven Mayor John DeStefano Jr. announced in late June that he would like to convert a short expressway segment near the Connecticut city’s downtown to a boulevard. Filling a sunken, less-than-one-mile section of the Route 34 Oak Street Connector...
The Upper Rock District, which has been called the first plan to convert an existing suburban business park into a mixed-use neighborhood, has won approval from the City of Rockville, Maryland, council (see images above and on page 1). The 20-acre...