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.
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...
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...
A former suburban mall near Chattanooga, Tennessee, has increased its retail occupancy dramatically as a result of a plan to convert it to a 70-acre mixed-use town center. Eastgate Town Center had a 27 percent occupancy rate in 1997 that has risen...
Ground has been broken for the first phase of Cascade Station, a mixed-use urban center adjacent to Portland International Airport. Designed by LMN Architects of Seattle in collaboration with Calthorpe Associates, Cascade Station incorporates two...
In Denver, ground has been broken for a dense, urban addition to the city’s downtown. The Commons neighborhood will grow on 51 acres of vacant rail yards, and its street grid will connect with Denver’s bustling LoDo neighborhood and the 16th Street...
As the New Urbanism rides a crest of public attention, more developers are incorporating ideas from the movement into suburban-style projects.
Arecent article on New Urbanism in Time magazine mentioned Centennial, a “New England-type TND” north...
Traditional neighborhood developments under construction in the US rose by 28 percent in 1999.
Traditional neighborhood development (TND) in the U.S. continued its steady growth in 1999. However, on a percentage basis, the increase was not as...
Peter Katz, author of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, was interviewed on ABC World News Tonight on July 21. The subject was how the design of conventional suburbs offer teenagers little in the way of activities and richness of...