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 visually striking town center opened its doors five years ago — the first complete new urban town center — perhaps the first new US downtown in three quarters of a century. While its success is debatable, one thing is for sure — it can’t be...
I. Past and Future
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
Within a traditional urban fabric, public space has an identity; it exists as more than mere residue after the construction of buildings and roads....
Architect and town planner Leon Krier, the foremost European influence on the New Urbanism, weighs in on the future of growth in England.
Krier suggests that England needs to loosen its restrictive planning laws and should release several...
Neighborhood-scale projects completed or under construction rose by 37 percent in 2001, turning new urbanist plans into reality at an unprecedented rate.
So many new urbanist projects have slowly worked their way through the
planning pipeline...
The group Students for the New Urbanism at the University of Georgia in Athens has drafted a plan for improvements at a local mobile home park. The design adds amenities such as a community building and small businesses and fits 20 more trailers...
Alex Dunser, former project director of Rosemary Beach in Florida, has founded Wolf TND Consulting LLC, a consulting firm specializing in the location, acquisition, entitlement, development, and marketing of traditional neighborhood developments.
CNU’s street guidebook for California suggests steps toward better highways.
Across the United States, activists and engineers have been figuring out how to turn urban stretches of state highways into civic amenities. CNU is joining the discussion...
The Dallas branch of RTKL Associates has designed a mixed-use town center for The Woodlands, a 27,000-acre planned conventional community outside Houston. Since its establishment in the early 1970s, the Woodlands has grown to approximately 40,000...
A mixed-use, infill development is now under construction in the historic Viewmont neighborhood in Hickory, North Carolina. Viewmont Square will feature 36 Charleston-style townhouses and a retail building topped by two floors of condominiums. Other...
The City Council in North Miami, Florida, has adopted a master plan for the redevelopment of the NE 6th Avenue corridor. A charrette led by the Treasure Coast Regional Planning Council produced proposals for, among other things, narrowing the...
See hard copy; table text exceeds limits of file space
Baltimore design firm Design Collective has won a competition to design mixed-use residential and retail buildings for a housing development in the Pudong district of Shanghai, China. The firm was awarded a $100,000 prize and the right to negotiate...