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.
A 1,200-unit new urban development in the small coastal town of Brookings, Oregon, will carry on the building traditions of the early 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area architect Bernard Maybeck.
From 1913 to 1915, Maybeck worked on a company...
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is supporting a program to ‘change the mindset of the whole country.’
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s campaign to reform Americans’ unhealthy way of life is growing into an impressively well- financed effort —...
Experts debate alternatives to conventional thoroughfare design and street networks.
December 10 and 11, 50 CNU members met in Oakland, California for a groundbreaking meeting about planning and designing streets. The gathering included...
Federal Reserve governor Edward Gramlich says the US could save $250 billion over the next 25 years by adopting smart growth strategies in preference to continued sprawl development.
In Gwinnett County, Georgia (suburban Atlanta), a new smart growth overlay ordinance targets a landscape of aging malls and big-box stores for redevelopment as mixed-use neighborhoods. Eligible developments—at least 10 acres and built on already-...
Dowell Myers and Elizabeth Gearin of the University of Southern California list six factors that — along with the aging of the population — could lead more and more people to prefer denser, walkable neighborhoods. The six factors exist to varying...
A clue to the unfolding transformation of Beekman Street in Saratoga Springs is a tiny barber shop with a sign in its window announcing that the 15-by-20-foot building is soon to become a coffee bar.
Beekman Street, which decades ago boasted a mix...
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...
An international group of planners rethinks how the city’s industrial waterfront should mature.
Toronto residents are getting excited about the idea of creating “water rooms” on underused land between the Canadian city’s downtown and nearby Lake...