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 Urban Design Associates W.W. Norton, 2004, 230 pp., $55 paperback. In the 1970s, Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates (UDA) photodocumented every house in a historic district in York, a small southcentral Pennsylvania city that had...
In the following discussion of characteristic code issues with live-work units, three assumptions are made. The first is that the work component occurs on the ground floor only, directly accessible from a public face of the building. The second is...
Facing a worsening shortage of inexpensive housing, officials in San Diego are devising a plan aimed at spurring construction of tiny, single-room occupancy units known as SROs.
Susan Tinsky of the San Diego Housing Commission says development of...
The first town center in Denver’s 4,700-acre Stapleton development has opened on East 29th Avenue, with tenants that include a 58,000 sq. ft. King Soopers grocery store, a series of small shops and restaurants, and 34,000 square feet of offices.
The cost of owning a car went up to $6,890/year, up from $6,420/year last year, says the American Automobile Association. The rates are calculated for a 2004 vehicle driven 10,000 miles a year and owned five years.
The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in collaboration with Northern Light Productions, has produced a documentary called Making Sense of Place — Phoenix: The Urban Desert. The 58-minute film explores the tensions caused by rapid growth and economic...
Zoning codes are like the DNA of the built environment – unseen but hugely influential in determining shape and function. As long as conventional, mid-20th century codes remain the law, as they do in most communities in the country, they effectively...
Taking advantage of a lull in development in Silicon Valley, the Greenbelt Alliance sponsored a plan that demonstrates an alternative to proposed sprawl in the 6,800-acre Coyote Valley. The plan, which preserves most of the land as farms and natural...
Fifty-two juniors in the Georgia Tech College of Architecture’s design studio got hands-on experience in new urban community design this semester by developing concepts for the town center of Serenbe, a 900-acre development in Palmetto, GA (New...
New urbanists in New England are hoping the University of Hartford will seize the opportunity to turn its fledgling architecture program into a much-needed center for urban design with a new urbanist bent. “That’s something I’ve been advocating to...
By Bob Regan; photos by Tim Fabian The Local History Company, 2004, 142 pp., paperback $21.95. Clambering over the hills above the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers, Pittsburgh is one of the most up-and-down cities in North America. To...
On a 100-by-100-foot lot in Hoboken, New Jersey, stands a parking garage that’s only slightly taller than a four-story rowhouse, yet which holds 324 vehicles — more than three times the number that would fit into a conventional parking ramp of that...