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.
Category: public open space. Subcategory: plazas and squares.
Subsequent pages will cover the urban circle and the rotary.
A circus is a regular, concavely curved urban open space; a circular variant of the urban square. Circuses are the...
A new neighborhood in Breckenridge, Colorado, addresses the need for affordable homes for year-round residents and overcomes the difficulties of building a traditional neighborhood at 9,500 feet.
Like many other ski resorts in the Rocky Mountains...
“New Urbanism is not a social service program. A walkable neighborhood will not provide day care and affordable health care for impoverished families, or counseling for substance abusers, or community policing to help control crime. ... New Urbanism...
A group of Canadian urban designers from Toronto has organized the Urban Design Group, associated with the Ontario Professional Planners Institute. Some participants are members of CNU, others are sympathizers; all apply new urbanist principles in...
CNU members are the key to making CNU.org as accurate, up-to-date, and informative as possible. Members can provide information about themselves and their practices. They will update information about development projects. They will upload new...
New Urban Communities of Del Ray is developing BotAnica/Sea Plum in Jupiter, Florida, the company’s first neighborhood-scale project. This 143-acre TND, designed by Cotleur-Hearing, will include 360 apartments, 138 single family homes, 132 townhomes...
The majority of transit-oriented developments (TODs) are built adjacent to rail lines, but the Twin Creeks project under construction in Central Point in southwestern Oregon, is part of an effort to boost regional bus service. Comprised of 1,500...
In California, ground has been broken for the Hercules Waterfront District, the first new urbanist development project in the San Francisco Bay Area city, which last year adopted a regulating plan and a typological code created by Dover Kohl &...
Despite numerous setbacks, Pulte Home Corp. is not giving up on Salamanca, the 160-acre traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Dade County, Florida. The project, the nation’s largest homebuilder’s first attempt at TND and the first test of...
Fairfax County, Virginia, supervisors approved a $100 million transit-oriented development on 58 acres at the Huntington Metro Station, the first project under the county’s new “smart growth” measure. The developers plan to build a combination of...
Local governments in Pennsylvania are encouraged to adopt traditional neighborhood development (TND) ordinances by recent revisions to the state Municipalities Planning Code (MPC). Adopted in 2000, a TND section was authored by State Rep. Robert...
New designs north of the border focus on infill and sustainability.
Canada saw rapid growth in new urbanist projects in the late 1990s, when more than 20 traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) began construction, primarily in greenfield...