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.
Holt & Haugh, developers of Fairview Village in Fairview, Oregon, bought out their equity partners in the Chinook Way Apartments, a 124-unit apartment development within the village. The apartments were slow to absorb during the first six months...
Do you need help convincing fire officials that narrow neighborhood streets can accommodate fire engines and other emergency vehicles? One avenue is the new video Walkable Streets and the Fire Department put out by the Local Government Commission in...
More regional planning needed; developments are valuable as models.
Leading new urbanists gathered in Charleston this spring for the first organized attempt to critique new urbanist built work. Designers and developers presented eight projects,...
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...
The Gulch Neighborhood, a high-density mixed-use development Nashville, Tennessee. The $350 million plan, calling for 1,800 residential units and more than a million square feet of retail, was designed by Looney Ricks Kiss of Memphis.
The infill project Media Village combines senior housing, ground-floor retail, and subterranean public parking on a 3-acre block in downtown Burbank, California. Designed by Mark Gangi of Gangi Development, Media Village interacts with the street in...
American Village Properties has designed a site plan for Town Centre West, a 34-acre mixed-use development in the Indianapolis suburb of Carmel, Indiana. The greenfield development site is located in a northwest commercial corridor. The plan...
Cagan Crossings, a town center and apartment development in Orlando, Florida, has gained critical momentum over the last year. The second phase of the project has been completed and the 272 new apartments are 90 percent leased. A newly redesigned...
I’On, a 243-acre new urbanist development in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, was named the Best Community in the Charleston Area for the second year running by the Charleston Trident Home Builders Association.
US Representatives Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) of the House’s Livable Communities Taskforce and Wayne Gilchrist (R-MD) recently reintroduced legislation that would provide $50 million to states, regional programs, and tribal governments to assist in...
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...