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.
Miramar, Florida, is planning a $130 million, 54-acre town center designed by Torti Gallas & Partners/CHK. The project includes a new city hall, cultural arts center, and library, in addition to 225 apartments, 290,000 square feet of office...
Four smart growth awards, out of 17 total awarded by the State of Maryland, went to the City of Gaithersburg and projects in that municipality. The city won an award for its overall smart growth policy. An award was given to Market Square, the town...
Westbury, a good-looking Hope VI project, has begun construction in Portsmouth, Virginia. Hope VI is the US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s nationwide program to redevelop failed public housing projects into mixed-use, mixed-income...
In early October, senior CNU members Shelley Poticha, Andres Duany, Phyllis Bleiweis, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Jonathan Rose, Victor Deupi, and Paul Murrain joined 30 of the world’s most prominent advocates of traditional town planning for an...
The New Jersey Office of State Planning has published Designing New Jersey, to encourage an informed debate on statewide design principles. The publication draws on the examples of communities planned and built in the state in the late 19th Century...
Once the social and economic cen-
ter of Montgomery County, the Washington suburb of Silver Spring has steadily declined since the early 1960s, when the migration to new suburbs siphoned housing, offices, and retail away from the urban...
The San Francisco Bay region, Charlotte, NC, and Portland, OR, are moving forward with transit villages.
If you want to see how transit will shape development in the 21st Century,
you need to look at three regions that are the current leaders...
Project New Town is the provisional name for what could become Wisconsin’s largest development with a new urbanist pattern. The project is proposed for a 430-acre greenfield site in Sun Prairie and would include 1,600 residences, retail, and a...
Landscape architect David Yocca and his firm Conservation Design Forum of Elmhurst, Illinois, have been hired to design a new urbanist community on an 831-acre site in the small town of Plano, about 50 miles from downtown Chicago. Yocca has...
The third phase of Heritage at Freemason Harbour, an infill development in downtown Norfolk, Virginia, was recently completed. The project now has 184 apartments and a one-block main street, which includes a 3,000 square foot grocery store....
Ellen Dunham-Jones was hired to direct the architecture program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. Dunham-Jones, a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, is leaving her position as associate professor of architecture at the Massachusetts...
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...