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 first grouping of homes around a square has been completed in Annesgrove, upstate New York’s first traditional neighborhood development. The houses in the Onondaga County project are clad in vinyl, but the developer has taken advantage of new...
The City of Beaverton, Oregon, had great hopes for its transit-oriented development, the Round at Beaverton Central, but is left with a couple of building shells after construction shut down in 1999. According to the Portland Oregonian, developer...
Just as home owners can learn to improve their homes, citizens can learn to take active part in the improvement of their communities. That’s the philosophy behind Real Towns: Making Your Neighborhood Work, written by Harrison Bright Rue and...
Not since the 1940s have so many older cities enjoyed population growth.
For most of our major metropolitan areas, the 1970s were a disaster. St. Louis, for example, lost a little more than a quarter of its population. A fifth of the people in...
The first major juried awards focusing solely on new urbanist design demonstrate the breadth of the trend.
No Seasides or Celebrations are to be found among the winners of the first
annual Charter Awards, announced by the Congress for the New...
Professor Victor Deupi’s fourth-year architecture students at Notre Dame University recently participated in a home design competition for I’On, a 243-acre TND in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. Pella Windows Corporation provided the $1000 prize...
New interactive site provides a wealth of information.
The CNU website, CNU.org, went through a transformation at the end of
April. It now has a new look and contains many times more information than ever before. The new site is designed to...
Houston’s Main Street is getting a face-lift, to create a transit-oriented environment in preparation for coming light rail. In 1999, Mayor Lee Brown created the Main Street Coalition, a public/private partnership, for the purpose of transforming...
Avalon at Arlington Square, which opened its doors this January in Arlington, Virginia, is a new urbanist take on the rental apartment community. Master planned by Torti Gallas/CHK of Silver Spring, Maryland, (in collaboration with SKG Architects...
The first homes are selling well in Del Paso Nuevo, a 150-acre TND in Sacramento, California, under construction with the help of $10.4 million in grants and loans from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. The houses, the first of...
Eight new townhomes, each designed with flex space for home office use, will be built in Avalon Park’s town center by American Heritage Homes. Located southeast of Orlando, Avalon Park is a fast-selling project with many new urbanist design elements...
The second phase of the satellite city of Bahcesehir, 30 minutes west of Istanbul, Turkey, was designed by Torti Gallas and Partners/CHK using new urbanist principles. The completed 3,500-unit first phase is a conventional mix of identical high-rise...