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.
Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina, for the past 25 years, was selected to receive the $100,000, first annual J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionary Urban Development from the Urban Land Institute. Riley has overseen a substantial...
Voters in Clearwater, Florida, rejected (58 percent to 42 percent) a plan to revitalize their downtown using new urbanist principles. The $300 million project by developer George de Guardiola would have brought 320,000 square feet of retail, a 250-...
The Regional City, a new book from Peter Calthorpe, will be in book stores in October. The book is co-authored by William Fulton, president of the Ventura, California, Solimar Research Group and editor of the newsletter California Planning and...
Prospect, a traditional neighborhood development in Longmont, Colorado, has opened its first commercial building. The 10,500-square-foot building is fully leased and houses a post office, several professional offices, and a cafe. In addition to...
One of the fastest growing municipalities in Arizona, Prescott Valley has changed from entirely rural to suburban in the last two decades, and has never had a downtown. Now, public officials in Prescott Valley are following a nationwide trend to...
Builders in Cherry Hill Village, Canton Township, Michigan, were prepared to use vinyl siding throughout most of their 350-acre traditional neighborhood development. Architectural codes were drafted by designer Looney Ricks Kiss governing the use...
The website will have New Urbanism resources and portals to other sites.
Avirtual city has been proposed to promote New Urbanism (NU) via the Internet. The suggested name is Izbal, after a mythical Mayan city (this name is not final, and there...
A potentially ground breaking traffic calming project has hit a road block with the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). The project would bring calming measures to a 20-mile stretch of Rural Route 50 which runs through three historic...
With startup funding from the Siemens Corporation, the Notre Dame School of Architecture established the South Bend Urban Center. The purpose is to use the urban design expertise of faculty and students to work with public officials and developers...
Valencia Town Center Drive is the first main street in California to be built from the ground up in recent decades. The half-mile street is an extension of Valencia Town Center, a regional shopping mall in the master-planned community Valencia, 30...
Firm wants to finance apartments near town centers.
Kensington Marquette Partners of Chicago, a firm that manages assets from several state teachers’ pension funds, is seeking to invest in apartments in traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs...
The nation’s broadest implementation of new urbanist zoning ordinances is underway in Wisconsin, where a 1999 smart growth law mandates that all cities, towns, and villages with a population of more than 12,500 adopt a model TND ordinance by January...