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.
Chicago has a much more mixed pattern of development in and near downtown than existed 20 years ago. The central area, about 1.5 miles wide and 4.5 miles long, had a resident population of about 53,400 in 1980. Now it’s home to between 85,000 and 90...
Boston architect and urban designer David Dixon, a principal in the Boston architecture, planning and preservation firm of Goody, Clancy & Associates, has been elected the 68th president of the Boston Society of Architects, the nation’s largest...
Hillsborough County, where Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company completed a semiregionial plan in 1999, is pursuing a number of new urban plans. The county approved a traditional neighborhood development ordinance in October, 2002, according to county...
As we go to press, the New Urbanism division of the American Planning Association has just completed elections for its three officer positions. All were contested races. If you are an APA member and are interested in taking part in this new division...
The American Farmland Trust says the US is losing two acres of mostly prime farmland to development every minute. “We are consuming more land per person than at any time, in the most wasteful way,” said Trust President Ralph Grossi. More than half...
A three-year study sponsored by Smart Growth America reveals higher traffic fatality rates and poorer air quality afflicting metropolitan areas that sprawl. The ten most-sprawling areas average 36 traffic deaths per 100,000 people, while the least...
The Layered Vista combines the Terminated Vista with the Deflected Vista. (These latter were discussed in the previous two Technical Pages.) It names the situation in which the view down a street frames a distant feature which appears above, or...
Miami Township, Ohio, is planning to convert a mile-long economically depressed suburban commercial corridor to a town center with neighborhoods. The township, an affluent suburb of Cincinnati, is assembling three key parcels amounting to nearly 50...
Lee Sobel, former Knight Fellow with the University of Miami and author of the CNU publication Greyfields into Goldfields, left CB Richard Ellis to work with the Environmental Protection Agency’s Smart Growth Division, where he will focus on real...
A sampling of recent media reports shows the New Urbanism is making inroads in the Midwest. Three prime examples:
Akron, Ohio. An embattled new urbanist project, Canal Town Builders’ ten-acre Hickory Street residential development, won city council...
Robert Kramer and Jeffrey Fleeman, two of the principal developers of Haile Village Center in Gainesville, Florida, expect to develop a 500-acre mixed-use community on Mexico’s Pacific coast 75 miles north of Puerta Vallarta. “It will range from...
A new ordinance in Howard County, Maryland, requires developers to set aside a portion of their housing production for moderate-income families. The first beneficiaries of the ordinance are nine families that were allowed to buy townhouses for half...