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 “American Dream” has always included not only owning your own home but being your own boss. It is odd therefore that not nearly as much thought, effort, and money have gone into how to provide affordable workspace as into achieving affordable...
How to code live/work units, a new building type in the modern mixed-use era, is often tricky. Nowhere have fire and safety codes for live/work units created as much controversy as in Fairview Village in Fairview, Oregon. Businesses on Village...
The General Services Administration (GSA) has developed a “kit of parts” consisting of benches, bollards, ornamental railings, and other elements that can help protect a building from attackers in vehicles and at the same time contribute to the...
Brian Wright recently moved on from Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company to become the director of town planning and urban design at the Southern Land Company. u
Three Chicago area organizations — the Campaign for Sensible Growth, the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus, and the Metropolitan Planning Council — have produced a 66-page workbook, Sensible Tools for Healthy Communities: A Decision-Making Workbook for...
Construction is under way on the first 230 houses in Costa Pacific Communities’ large Villebois project in Wilsonville, Oregon (see Sept. 2003 New Urban News). In August the company sold 39 acres to West Hills Development; the land constitutes the...
The National Center for Bicycling and Walking, based in Washington, DC, teamed up with the Rhode Island Statewide Planning Program to conduct workshops in eight Rhode Island municipalities on how to make communities more pedestrian-friendly. Mark...
Ed McMahon, an attorney and planner who cofounded Scenic America and has been vice president and director of land use programs at The Conservation Fund, has been named Charles Fraser Senior Resident Fellow for Sustainable Development at the Urban...
The winners of CNU’s Charter Awards don’t just look good in magazine spreads. By embodying the principles of the Charter, they illustrate how New Urbanism improves and enriches our built landscape.
This fall the educational value of the awards...
By Dolores Hayden with aerial photographs by Jim Wark W.W. Norton, 2004, 128 pp., $24.95. The latest book by Dolores Hayden, a professor of architecture and American studies at Yale, possesses the earnestness found in just about every strongly...
When Walgreens anticipated it would have a hard time gaining permission to build a drugstore at the main intersection in Poland, Ohio, the company sought advice from a longtime local resident, Robert A. Mastriana. Mastriana, an architect and a...
“There’s a lot of new urbanist development going on in
South Florida,” says Thomas Jeffrey, chief financial officer of American Ventures Realty Investors, which manages the new South Florida Urban Initiatives Fund. “We’re got probably close to...