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.
Market Square in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is probably the most significant new urbanist retail development to open in 1999. Market Square is a new downtown shared by Kentlands and Lakelands, adjacent traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs)...
New Jersey’s FY 2000 budget includes $3 million for “Smart Growth Planning Grants” to assist counties and other government agencies in developing plans that “lead to reasonable managed growth strategies that will be translated into ordinances.” The...
A first-of-its-kind study measuring market demand for new urbanist housing in the Philadelphia region is being funded by the GreenSpace Alliance of Southeastern Pennsylvania and 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania. The study, by Zimmerman-Volk Associates...
A visit to new urbanist communities in Oregon inspired South Dakota developer Doug Metcalf to bring aspects of TND to Brandon, a city of 6,000 inhabitants outside Sioux Falls. Metcalf designed the 40-acre Tall Grass Village adjacent to an upscale...
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush is eliminating funding for the Eastward Ho! program as of September, 2000. The program promotes infill development in Eastern Florida, and provides about a million dollars annually to pay for smart growth planning by the...
The city of Syracuse, New York, and the surrounding Onondaga County now have a new urbanist plan to guide growth over the next 20 years. On October 13, Andres Duany presented the results of a week-long charrette to the public. One of the first...
Duany Plater Zyberk & Company, Miami, 1999. Plastic cover, 74 pp. (11" x 17"), $99. The Lexicon can only be ordered direct: 305-644-1021. Most active new urbanists have seen bits and pieces of The Lexicon of the New Urbanism. Anyone who has...
Transit oriented development (TOD) is becoming a crucial part of the effort to control Atlanta’s sprawl and smog problems. The effort got a boost in January when Bell South announced that it would join the fight against traffic congestion and sprawl...
CNU's long-awaited book, Charter of the New Urbanism, will be available in time for Christmas. This book is a collection of essays and commentary by 35 leading new urbanist thinkers. Each writer starts with a sentence from CNU's 1994 Charter and...
The New Urbanism has yet to make a strong foothold in Southern California, but the developers of Liberty, a planned TND in Riverside County, have been heartened by “the tremendous builder response” to the 2,900 acre, 7000-unit project, according to...
More than 100 people now reside in Courtside Village, a TND in Santa Rosa, California. Between 30 and 40 percent of the project’s 350 single family homes have been built, and designer Alan Cohen reports that the newly completed alley homes have...
Albuquerque, New Mexico, has a new plan to revitalize its languishing downtown, where office and retail vacancy rates both top 15 percent. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, the Alvarado project is unusual because it is financed primarily by a...