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 Texas Department of Transportation has earmarked $3 million in federal funds for sidewalks, crosswalks, bike paths, and other elements that will make it safer for schoolchildren to walk or ride their bicycles to school. Much of the money will be...
A Modern Arcadia, by Susan L. Klaus, published by the University of Massachusetts Press, tells the story of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York. Designed in 1909 by Frederick Law Omsted Jr., this commuter rail suburb of Manhattan set one of the...
The plan for Lantern Hill (above), an 18-acre infill development in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, shows 117 homes and 80,000 square feet of commercial buildings grouped around three small greens. One of the greens is rendered below. The project, under...
Six years ago, Safeway was defeated in its attempt to build a mixed-use retail center in Colorado called the North Boulder Village Center. The outcome was a disappointment for designer Peter Calthorpe, who looked at the plan as a potential model for...
Until Benjamin C. Thompson applied his imaginative touch, urban markets in the US mainly were somewhat grubby, underappreciated places that sold fish, meat, produce, and other necessities of life. The St. Paul-born, Yale-educated Thompson, who died...
Are New Urbanism and environmentalism potentially strong allies? One place to look for an answer is Denver’s Stapleton Airport redevelopment. Not only does the 4,700-acre project offer a combination of housing, employment, shopping, and neighborhood...
New urbanists have always been interested in street design. Since the New Urbanism was founded, its practitioners have experimented with street patterns, widths, and adjacent buildings. However, most of these efforts have resulted in one-time...
People who buy homes within a quarter-mile of a bus line or within a half-mile of a train station can now qualify with Fannie Mae for a mortgage eight percent larger in a growing number of cities. The company began offering larger mortgages three...
The Urban Land Institute published Great Planned Communities, a look at 26 large-scale master planned developments around the world. Although a few of the communities began construction in the 1960s and 1970s, most were designed in the last 10 years...
A 100-unit senior citizens apartment building called Franklin Arms is under construction in Norfolk, Virginia, as the first part of the HOPE VI redevelopment of the Bowling Green and Roberts Village public housing complex. The aim is to create an...
A street grid adds a human-scale element, enhances transit access, and creates the potential for urban-style redevelopment in two recent Colorado power centers.
Two Denver area shopping centers show how large-scale retail, when subjected to...
Peter Calthorpe’s “urban network” inspired architect Kevin Klinkenberg of Kansas City, Missouri, to offer an alternative system — clearly indebted to Calthorpe’s proposal, but with assumptions drawn from current retail methods, open space planning...