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.
Jackie Benson has formed a marketing consulting firm, J Benson Marketing in Atlanta, Georgia. Benson, a long-time marketing consultant for new urban projects, was with Milesbrand, which recently closed its Atlanta office. Contact: jackie@...
CNU’s seventeenth annual Congress, June 10-14 in Denver, focuses on New Urbanism as an economic beacon in these times. As the US and world economies face vexing related challenges — the mortgage crisis, economic recession, energy insecurity — CNU 17...
“I’d like for us to invest in mass transit because potentially that’s energy-efficient. I think people are a lot more open now to thinking regionally in terms of how we plan our transportation infrastructure. The days where we are just building...
Government leaders in Toronto are planning to install a network of light-rail lines that will greatly expand transit service across Canada’s largest city. Mayor David Miller and the Toronto Transit Commission have championed a 75-mile “Transit City...
In two developments within the past year, Wolff Lyon Architects of Boulder, Colorado, has produced two-family houses that have two fronts. As designed by principal Tom Lyon, each of these duplexes has one façade that faces a street and another...
A battle is being waged in South Carolina regarding a highway proposal that epitomizes the larger choices the nation faces on infrastructure investments. The highway is an extension of a beltway, I-526, that encircles much of Charleston, South...
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company has continued to refine “agricultural urbanism” — the idea “in which all aspects of urbanism are focused on food production.” The firm is drafting a booklet covering what it has learned from agricultural urbanism...
The Center for Applied Transect Studies has launched a website “to gather the work and intelligence of New Urbanists who use the Transect as a tool against sprawl and climate change.” The Center, a nonprofit think tank supporting research,...
Peter Katz has been appointed director of Smart Growth/Urban Planning by Sarasota County, Florida. In his new position, Katz, founding president of the Form-Based Codes Institute, will work on implementing smart growth principles for development and...
Monica Quigley, vice president of sales and marketing for LeylandAlliance, has formed a consulting firm, New Urban Connections, based in Warwick, New York. Quigley will continue to work for LeylandAlliance but will also advise her own clients on...
The first completed Bywater Cottages — two-family dwellings that wrap around sheltered outdoor spaces — “blend perfectly into their 19th-century surroundings,” arts writer Doug MacCash observed Jan. 31 in a New Orleans Times-Picayune article about...
Oakridge Centre, which in 1959 became the first automobile-oriented shopping center in Vancouver, British Columbia, is expected to be reshaped in the next few years into a high-density transit-oriented development mixing retail, employment, housing...