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 recent approval of Vickery, a new urbanist village development in Forsyth County, Georgia, (see October/November 2000) came at a price. Reacting to fears of density among the area’s residents, the Forsyth Commission cut the number of housing...
Public officials in Frisco, Texas, visited new urbanist town centers in nearby Addison and Plano, and decided their city needed something similar. A 140-acre site, which extends from Frisco’s historic downtown to the busy Dallas North Tollway,...
High-tech wizards, nose rings, and the proliferation of “bourgeois bohemians” may all be harbingers of a renaissance in American urbanism, according to some experts. A recent conference in Atlanta, “The New Urbanism for the New Economy,” explored...
The developers of Mashpee Commons transform a lackluster street and balance the mix of local and national retailers.
Over the past 10 years, Mashpee Commons’ pedestrian-oriented shopping district has grown incrementally around an outdated strip...
Several emerging university centers take on new urbanist and smart growth research and education.
Universities in Maryland, Georgia, Florida, and Indiana have opened — or will soon open — centers that focus on smart growth and community building...
An audit of Illinois municipalities shows that while smart growth is a hot topic among planners, few or no towns have regulations allowing compact, mixed-use developments.
Developers and designers of new urbanist neighborhoods have long known how...
Federal Small Business Administration loans support sprawl, according to a lawsuit filed by environmentalists. Friends of the Earth and the Forest Conservation Council analyzed SBA loans in the Washington, DC, area during the last three years and...
One of the basic tenets of new urbanist planning is to establish an open street grid that promotes the free flow of pedestrian and automobile traffic. But what if a closed street has become a haven for pedestrians? Should the need for...
Plans for Bloomfield Park have been formally submitted to the planning department in Bloomfield Township, Michigan. The township has a building height restriction of 32 feet in its master plan, but developer Harbor Cos. proposes to build office...
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) has recently undertaken several new urbanist retrofits of conventional communities already under construction. In the firm’s first foray inside the Charlotte, North Carolina, city limits, DPZ conducted a charrette...
The path has been cleared for Atlantic Station (formerly Atlantic Steel), the $2 billion mixed-use, brownfield project in Midtown Atlanta. Demolition of the old steel mill and remediation of the site is close to complete, and with the final...
The planning director in Charlotte, North Carolina, recently urged the City Council to exert greater control over growth in this rapidly expanding metropolitan area. Martin Cramton recommended that the city create mixed-use zoning districts around...