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.
Jamestown Properties has acquired the small Atlanta developer Green Street Properties to pursue the “green development” trend in the US. Green Street was cofounded in 2001 by former MindSpring Enterprises Inc. CEO Charles Brewer and fellow New...
The Mount Dora City Commission in Florida has approved plans by Crosland LLC to build a 162-acre traditional neighborhood called Indian Springs. The development, on the site of an old tree farm and nursery in a town of about 12,000, north of Orlando...
The US Green Building Council and Island Press, both nonprofit, are together starting GreenWorks, a book club that promises to offer “the newest and best books on green building at discounted prices.” The first four books to be featured are Emerald...
Bruce Tolar led a four-day planning session in October that proposed a new zoning code, tree-lined streets, a farmers’ market, a trackside entertainment district, and other ideas for enhancing Flora, Mississippi, a town of about 1,600 people near...
The City Council in Biloxi, Mississippi, voted in late December to allow “Mississippi Cottages” — state-supplied versions of Katrina Cottages — to remain permanently in some parts of the Gulf Coast community. Both Biloxi and the smaller city of Pass...
The new US administration’s economic stimulus plan is sometimes framed as a battle between roads and transit. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) has a sensible proposal to bridge that divide — if anyone is listening.
While the CNU supports...
To create an attractive gateway to downtown Charlotte, North Carolina, and to serve the future NASCAR Hall of Fame, a 30-acre Interstate highway interchange near the city’s center is being replaced with a more compact urban interchange.
The Victoria Transport Policy Institute in British Columbia has explored location-efficient mortgages and the related concept of “location-efficient development” in great detail in a chapter of the Institute’s Online TDM [Transport Demand Management...
New Urban News asked some leading new urbanists to write open letters to President-elect Barack Obama in an effort to identify a new national agenda for urbanism. In many cases, the letters were shortened significantly for print publication, but the...
Since street network connectivity affects all new urbanist projects (and too many good projects are held back by a lack of traditional urban street grids beyond their borders), both individual urbanists and the overall movement will benefit from CNU...
New York City created an esplanade this summer on one of Manhattan’s busiest streets — Broadway from 35th to 42nd Street — by eliminating two lanes of vehicular traffic. Benches and chairs were installed on block-long stretches of the newly carved-...
Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod “is weathering the storm very well,” Douglas Storrs says of the impact of the national economic downturn on one of nation’s longest-established new urban mixed-use centers. “It is interesting to note how well our...