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.
In Lakewood, Colorado, 100 acres of shopping mall and parking lots is about to yield to an urban center.
The Villa Italia Mall is typical of the ailing, greyfield malls that line the nation’s suburban corridors. On the cutting edge of retail...
Van Meter Williams Pollack of San Francisco has hired Kevin Gardiner, an urban designer formerly with Malcom Carpenter Associates.
A new group, Pennsylvania Association of New Urbanists, has begun meeting. Among the members are state Rep. Robert Freeman, who authored a traditional neighborhood development section to the state Municipalities Planning Code, town planners Thomas...
A Seaside historic district? The oldest buildings in the first new urbanist town are only 20 years old, but the idea is not as absurd as it sounds, according to attorney Doris Goldstein, who advises the Seaside Development Company. The earliest...
In Atlanta — as in most US metropolitan areas — traffic congestion is getting far worse, imposing real costs on every driver, according to a recent New York Times editorial by Paul Krugman. Moreover, commuters who drive to work during the city’s six...
Gondolier Press has released The Forgotten Child: Cities for the Well-Being of Children, by Henry L. Lennard and Suzanne H. Crowhurst Lennard. The book explores the failure of the modern city to provide a suitable habitat for its children. Contact...
McGraw-Hill has published a CD Rom, Architectural Elements: Traditional Construction Details, with 1,300 CAD-compatible traditional standard details by architect Stephen Mouzon. A book version is expected to be released shortly. Contact: (256) 539-...
In its latest report, Driven to Spend, the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP) set out to determine how sprawl patterns and public transit choice affect people’s transportation budgets. STPP concluded that residents spend most on...
“Since 1982, while the US population has grown nearly 20 percent, the time Americans spend in traffic has jumped an amazing 236 percent. ... The average driver now spends the equivalent of nearly a full work week each year stuck in traffic. That’s...
Sarasota County in Florida has hired the Orlando planning and consulting firm Glatting Jackson to lead a team of advisors that will flesh out the details of the county’s Resource Management Area (RMA) approach to future growth. The incentives-based...
Recent developments in the Washington, DC, area demonstrate a variety of techniques for placing a large grocery store in a mixed-use urban environment.
Of all the big box store types, supermarkets are the most common, are used most frequently by...
The Congress for the New Urbanism prefaced its ninth annual congress with a daylong series of lectures and discussions by luminaries in the new urbanist (NU) movement. “New Urbanism 101” was designed to give an overview of NU history and principles...