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 City of Sarasota, Florida, rezoned more than 1,800 downtown parcels in August, the final step in implementing a new code based on the SmartCode. In May of 2004 the city approved the code itself. u
More than two-thirds of US citizens live in the nation’s 10 megalopolises — from the Northeast seaboard’s vast urbanized area, which runs from Maine to Virginia, to “Cascadia,” which extends from Oregon to southwest British Columbia. In an article...
Visual Reference Publications published Public Transportation: On the Move, a book on products and design of mass transit systems. The 230-page publication has 500 color images. Contact 212/279-7000.
San Francisco’s newest multiway boulevard will be completed by mid-September, further aiding the revival of what had been a bedraggled portion of the Hayes Valley neighborhood southwest of downtown. The four-block thoroughfare, known as Octavia...
Baltimore-based Design Collective Inc. has been chosen to lead a charrette that will develop a plan for transforming the Columbia Town Center, the commercial heart of the 100,000-population Maryland “New Town.” In a fast-paced selection process, the...
Oshara Village in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, was approved in June, and what a difference a dozen years makes in terms of permitting, according developer Alan Hoffman. Aldea, the county’s first traditional neighborhood development (TND), was...
The developer of Clarksburg Town Center, a 1,300-unit project being built in Montgomery County, Maryland, is feeling the sting of a resident backlash. Homeowners who, based on marketing literature, had expected the development to include a...
Congress in late July passed a six-year $286 billion transportation bill that includes approximately $52 billion for mass transit and $612 million for the Safe Routes to School program. Under the school program, state transportation departments will...
The Congress for the New Urbanism will continue to benefit from the oversight and guidance of its founders while welcoming four talented new members to its board, based on actions taken at the CNU board of director’s June meeting in Pasadena.
At...
Combining the strengths of several disciplines, the University of Michigan this year will offer a new certificate program in real estate development that focuses on building well-designed, sustainable, communities. Christopher Leinberger, a...
It began with an idea from planning consultant Brad Scheib of Hoisington Koegler Group in 1998: Why not build a mixed-use development in Ramsey, a growing suburb 20 miles northwest of downtown Minneapolis? “Mostly the reaction was ‘we can’t do that...
Island Press, 2005, 304 pp., paperback $29.95. Ann Breen and Dick Rigby run the Waterfront Center, a nonprofit Washington, DC-based organization they founded in 1981 to promote the best possible redevelopment of urban waterfronts. They travel a lot...