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.
How will our suburbs look 25 years from now? Reid Ewing, a planner and professor at Rutgers University, predicts that a significant amount of new development will be new urbanist, but argues that the stronger trend will be toward the segmentation of...
Celebration, the new urbanist town in Osceola County, Florida, will soon be home to a new educational facility, a satellite campus for Stetson University. The 35,300-square-foot building is under construction on one acre near Celebration’s town...
Residential construction has begun in Mission Bay, a brownfield development that will cover more than 300 acres adjacent to San Francisco’s downtown. The Mission Housing Development Corporation is building the first complex of 100 affordable...
The Orange County, California, Council of Governments is presenting an ideas/design competition to explore ways for the county to absorb an additional 1 million residents, 300,000 housing units, and 1 million employees during the next 20 years and...
Two major ballot initiatives on growth management were defeated by voters in the November elections. In Arizona, the Sierra Club launched Proposition 202, which would have mandated that all cities, towns, and counties adopt voter-approved growth...
Avirtual city on the nternet proposed by Andres Duany to promote the New Urbanism is on hold, according to the Miami architect. The urban Transect, upon which the internet site will be based, is still not fully developed as a concept, Duany says....
Mixed-use research and academic communities in the form of traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) are among the latest design challenges facing new urbanists.
Universities historically have employed great urban design on campus, and some...
The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) is running a controversial $1 million ad campaign using sprawl as a reason to limit immigration. The group claims that sprawl is caused, for the most part, by mass immigration. Anti-sprawl groups...
The Town Council of Huntington Township, New York, has selected Ron Stein as the municipality’s first smart growth coordinator. Stein founded the nonprofit group Vision Huntington, which spearheaded an effective campaign to get public officials and...
Historic American Towns along the Atlantic Coast, a book by Warren Boerschenstein of the University of Virginia, surveys more than 140 towns that have survived in relative isolation and features detailed discussions of nine of these human-scale...
A Texas project is selling a lot of homes at an affordable price, while maintaining the essence of the New Urbanism.
Before breaking ground on Plum Creek in Kyle, Texas, Steve Tucker of Benchmark Land Development went on a tour of famous new...
A new advocacy coalition, Smart Growth America, releases report on Americans’ changing attitudes toward sprawl. Americans are ready for new approaches to managing growth in their communities, the new poll suggests. Seventy-eight percent of...