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.
Frustrated by an inability to get financing for infrastructure construction, developer Steve Soler told The New York Times in June that he would like to sell the $300 million transit-oriented development in Redding, Connecticut, that he has been...
What is believed to be the first citywide, fully mapped adoption of the SmartCode took place in June in Pass Christian, Mississippi. SmartCode consultant Sandy Sorlien says the Gulf Coast municipality, where Jeff Bounds is city planner, has been...
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?
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.
John Anderson and his partner David Kim are now working as consultants and/or developers on “a constellation of small infill projects” in Chico, California. Formerly of New Urban Builders, they started a new firm, Anderson/Kim Architecture + Urban...
The Town of Davidson, about a half-hour north of downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, is steering a middle course.
By Léon Krier, edited by Dhiru A. Thadani and Peter J. Hetzel
If you’ve never read Léon Krier, you’ve missed a tremendous pleasure.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported April 22 that the redevelopment of a 28-acre former industrial site into the Glenwood Park neighborhood has been largely successful. For being new, it feels old-fashioned, says resident Abbie Gulson, in a “Can...
“Any city is basically an oil well or a coal mine — it’s sitting on energy,” Douglas Foy, secretary of commonwealth development under former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, told a Lincoln Institute of Land Policy conference in late April. “Any...
At the Regional Plan Association’s Regional Assembly in New York in April, New Urban News ran into Jebediah Reed, the young journalist who recently established the website The Infrastructurist. Reed says he envisions the site as an accessible place...
Frank Greene, town architect since 2005 for the Rosemary Beach development in the Florida Panhandle, has a new firm, Element 5 Studio LLC, based in Rosemary Beach and providing architectural, interior design, and community services. His partners...