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 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...
• Conceal the protection
• Retain pedestrian access, requiring
permeability
• Integrate security design and urban design
• Incorporate streetscape elements, such as trees and light fixtures, only as non- structural components of 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...
Pittsburghers are up in arms over a proposal to stop spending municipal funds to repair the hundreds of stairs that climb the city’s hills. In The Steps of Pittsburgh (reviewed in the June 2004 New Urban News), author Bob Regan reports that the 2002...
The following letter from CNU Board Chair Hank Dittmar is adapted from his opening address at CNU XII in Chicago.
It was especially gratifying to be part of CNU XXII in Chicago.
New urbanists have designed mixed-use office districts and retrofitted suburban office parks by adding walkable town centers. The transformation of an existing suburban office park into a mixed-use urban workplace district has never been attempted,...
In greater New York, suburban development no longer outcompetes development in the urban core. In a 31-county region centered on New York City, the urban core began in the mid-1990s to gain residents and jobs at the same rate as the periphery,...