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 has entered into a three-year Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Urban and Economic Development Division. This agreement will help CNU expand its work to encourage policy-makers, developers, and communities to...
St. Joe Corp. of Jacksonville, Florida, the largest landholder in the state, announced an agreement in principle October 1 to “combine” with the Arvida Company, a major real estate developer based in Boca Raton, Florida. The acquisition or merger...
New financial agreements have finally cleared the way for the construction of Playa Vista, the troubled but much heralded new urban development in Los Angeles designed by Moule & Polyzoides and Duany Plater-Zyberk. If built as planned, the...
Some supporters of New Urbanism believe that big box stores, typically built of dryvit faced cinderblocks and ranging from 25,000 sq. ft. to 250,000 sq. ft., have no place on traditional main streets. To date, very few such stores have located in...
A comprehensive plan created for Cherokee County, Georgia, located 20 miles north of Atlanta, calls for growth to be channeled into hamlets, villages and neighborhoods. The plan, which uses overlay zoning to create the traditional mixed-use centers...
The New Urbanism certainly has strong implications for planners, architects, traffic engineers, developers and the entire real estate industry. But its political ramifications are relatively unexplored. That may change, according to a column in the...
To date, CNU primarily has focused on creating and building an organization.
Former Congress for the New Urbanism executive director Peter Katz has launched a firm, Urban Advantage, to promote well-designed developments and improvements in the public realm. “We’re a full service consultancy promoting the inherent benefits of...
The City of Redmond, Washington, sprawling suburb and home of Microsoft Corp., almost had a four-anchor enclosed regional mall, planned and approved in the l980s. The 1989 bankruptcy of a major tenant intervened. When the project resurfaced in 1992...
Quantifying the benefits of New Urbanism poses problems for two reasons. First, the movement is so new that sufficient built examples for study are lacking. Second, some of the benefits are spiritual, and therefore defy measurement. How does one...
I’On, a traditional neighborhood development (TND) in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina (in the last issue, I’On was incorrectly identified as being in North Carolina), now has a journal. The inaugural issue of Civitas: the I’On Journal, was printed in...
After much controversy, the Town of Port Royal, South Carolina, approved a Traditional Town Code based on a master plan by Dover, Kohl & Partners of South Miami, Florida. The mandatory code applies to a 245-acre, largely historic central part of...