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.
The most recent census data shows that cities are growing at the expense of suburbs, according to a July 1 Wall Street Journal article. The demographic shift is a combination of preference for urban environments, and inability to sell homes in the...
Montgomery County, Maryland, a suburban area of nearly 1 million people bordering the nation’s capital, is considering adopting a system that would offer financial incentives and reduced impact fees to developers who build near mass transit, provide...
A page 1 article in the June 2009 issue referred to Hampton, Virginia, as a city with “little or no existing urbanism.” While mostly suburban in character, Hampton has a historic area with a grid of streets and a downtown. The city has been working...
The rural-to-urban Transect is based on the idea that there is a place for everything in the human habitat. Where elements of the built environment are in their proper place, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Through the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States developed mainly in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods. The pattern began to change with the emergence of modern architecture and zoning and the ascent of the automobile...
If the New Urbanism can be boiled down to a single idea, perhaps it would be making places walkable. But what makes pedestrians feel attracted to one place and want to avoid another?
Mixed-use development at the Columbia Town Center in Columbia, Maryland, and at Cottonwood Mall in Holladay, Utah, is being delayed by the depressed economy and by the bankruptcy filing of the Chicago-based owner, General Growth Properties (GGP)....
While the other three architects’ house proposals were all “contemporary” in design — in one case weirdly so — Mouzon’s energy-efficient house had a traditional appearance except for a few unfamiliar elements.
Research tells us that CO2 from transportation is the result of a location’s accessibility to major destinations and the design characteristics of an area. Thus, both where development goes and how it is designed matter.
The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Committee on Environmental Health released a major policy statement in late May calling for communities to be designed to facilitate physical activity, especially among children. About 17 percent of American...
Despite the improvement in the fortunes of many urban centers in the past decade, the Brookings Institution says “employment steadily decentralized between 1998 and 2006: 95 out of 98 metro areas saw a decrease in the share of jobs located within...
“The Story of Sprawl,” a two-DVD set of historic films ranging from Lewis Mumford’s The City, produced in 1939, to No Time for Ugliness, produced by the American Institute of Architects in 1965, has been released by Planetizen at $29.99. Viewers can...