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.
Construction began on the town center of King Farm, a new urbanist project in Rockville, Maryland. The town center will include 125,000 square feet of retail, including a Safeway supermarket, smaller shops and restaurants, and apartments above the...
Mason Run, a 55-acre new neighborhood in Monroe, Michigan, recently went under construction on the site of a former paper mill. The city acquired the mill and sold off a portion to Crosswinds Communities, which hired Urban Design Associates of...
Ground has been broken for the commercial town center in Park DuValle, the neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, built through the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope VI program. The 25,000- square-foot town center will include retail...
“New Hampshire needs to develop a New Urbanism,” states Republican gubernatorial candidate Jeff Howard in a position paper on sprawl. Howard’s platform includes calls for reassessing zoning codes, reusing vacant buildings, paying more attention to...
The Denver/Boulder region is rapidly emerging as the metropolitan area with the largest concentration of new urbanist communities.
Someone looking to move to a newurbanist community in the next few years could find an abundance of choices below...
Vince Graham, whose credits include the acclaimed traditional neighborhood developments I’On and Newpoint, has tentatively agreed to codevelop a bayfront property.
After years of land acquisition, land clearing, and political wrangling, the 90-...
Rural-urban categorization system is touted as effective in coding, education, and design. The Transect, a new model for planning and coding the New Urbanism, is beginning to be employed in regional planning. Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (...
Tim Hernandez, who led Pulte Homes’ failed effort to build the TND Salamanca in West Kendall, Florida, has formed his own company, New Urban Communities, based in Delray Beach. The firm will focus on developing smaller infill projects in downtowns...
Belmont, North Carolina, was one of the first municipalities nationwide to have a traditional neighborhood development (TND) ordinance. Now it appears that the municipality may get its first TND. The $40 million project will convert a historic...
Zoning ordinances in Fort Collins, CO; Huntersville, NC; and Austin, TX; are case studies of approaches to changing municipal land use regulations.
In response to encroaching sprawl, a small number of municipal planners
and elected officials...
In Canada’s foremost laboratory for the New Urbanism, planners knit together many projects to create a ring of interconnected neighborhoods around the existing town.
Markham was among the first municipalities in North America to adopt a new...
Homebuilders: Americans want it that way.
In its new report, Sprawl Costs Us All: How Your Taxes Fuel Suburban Sprawl, the Sierra Club suggests that it is not just the environment that is hurt by current development practices; American taxpayers...