New Urbanism

New urbanism is an urban design movement whose popularity increased from the beginning of the 1980s onwards. The goal of new urbanists is to reform all aspects of real estate development and urban planning. These include everything from urban retrofits, to suburban infill. The movement is particularly associated with the USA, with its "rediscovery" of urban patterns, which have had greater continuity in Europe.

Prospect New Town in Longmont, Colorado, showing a mix of aggregate housing and traditional detached homes.

There are some common elements of new urbanist design. New urbanist neighborhoods are walkable, and are designed to contain a diverse range of housing and jobs. New urbanists support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe these strategies are the best way to reduce the time people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl. Many other issues, such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the renovation of brownfield land are also covered in the Charter of the New Urbanism, the movement's seminal document. Because new urbanist designs include many of the features (like mixed use and emphasis on walkability) which characterized urban areas in the pre-automobile age, the movement is sometimes known as Traditional neighborhood design.

Background

Through the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States was developed in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods, much along the line of European cities. The pattern began to change with the emergence of modern architecture, zoning, and the ascension of the automobile with the availability of inexpensive gasoline. After World War II, a new system of development was implemented nationwide, replacing neighborhoods with a rigorous separation of uses that has become known as conventional suburban development, or sprawl. The majority of US citizens now live in suburban communities built in the last 50 years.

Although conventional suburban development has been popular, it carries a significant price. Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, conventional suburban development spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for the great majority of household and commuter trips.

Those who cannot drive are significantly restricted in their mobility. The working poor living in suburbia spend a large portion of their incomes on cars. Meanwhile, the American landscape where most people live and work is dominated by strip malls, auto-oriented civic and commercial buildings, and subdivisions without much individuality or character.

Trends

The new urbanism is a reaction to sprawl. For a growing movement of architects, planners, and developers, new urbanism is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable communities. New urbanists take a wide variety of approaches—some work exclusively on infill projects, others focus on transit-oriented development, still others are attempting to transform the suburbs, and many are working in all of these categories. New urbanism includes traditional architects and those with modernist sensibilities. All, however, believe in the power and ability of traditional neighborhoods to restore functional, sustainable communities. Early in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs authored The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which set the precedent for the new urbanist trend by condemning the accepted planning theories of the time; calling for an increased effort by planners to reconsider the failing single-use housing projects, large car-dependent thoroughfares, and segregated commercial centers that had become the "norm" of civic planning and zoning thought. Another mid-twentieth century writer that inspired the new urbanist movement was the social philosopher/historian Lewis Mumford, who criticized the "anti-urban" development of post-war America.

Today's popular trend of new urbanism had its roots in the work of maverick architects, planners, and theorists, like Jacobs, who believed that the conventional planning thought was gradually failing in one way or another. In the 1970s and 1980s, these new ideas emerged, particularly with the urban visions and theoretical models for the reconstruction of the "European" city proposed by architect Leon Krier and with the "pattern language" theories of Christopher Alexander. These eventually coalesced into a unified group in the 1990s. From modest beginnings, the trend is beginning to have a substantial impact. More than 600 new towns, villages, and neighborhoods are planned or under construction in the U.S., using principles of new urbanism. Additionally, hundreds of small-scale new urban infill projects are restoring the urban fabric of cities and towns by reestablishing walkable streets and blocks.

On the regional scale, new urbanism is having a growing influence on how and where metropolitan regions choose to grow. At least 14 large-scale planning initiatives are based on the principles of linking transportation and land-use policies and using the neighborhood as the fundamental building block of a region.

In Maryland and several other states, new urbanist principles are an integral part of smart growth legislation.

Moreover, new urbanism is beginning to have widespread impact on conventional development. Mainstream developers are adopting new urban design elements such as garages in the rear of houses, neighborhood greens and mixed-use town centers. Projects that adopt some principles of new urbanism but remain largely conventional in design are known as hybrids.

Old and new urbanism

The new urbanism trend goes by other names, including neotraditional design, transit-oriented development, and traditional neighborhood development. Borrowing from urban design concepts throughout history, new urbanism does not, and cannot merely replicate old communities. New houses within neighborhoods, for example, must provide modern living spaces and amenities that consumers demand (and that competing suburban tract homes offer). Stores and businesses must have sufficient parking, modern floor plans, and connections to automobile and pedestrian traffic, and/or transit systems.

With proper design, large office, light industrial, and even "big box" retail buildings can be situated in a walkable new urbanist neighborhood. Parking lots, the most prominent feature of conventional commercial districts, are accommodated to the side, the rear or basement of new urban businesses. The size of lots are reduced through shared parking, on-street parking, and shifts to other modes of transportation.

Another difference between old and new urbanism is the street grid. Most historic cities and towns in the US employ a grid that is relentlessly regular. New urbanists often use a "modified" grid, with "T" intersections and street deflections to calm traffic and increase visual interest.

That blending of old and new is the basis of the adjective neotraditional, a term that carries a lot of baggage, especially with modernists, who see it as an architectural "style." However, it is more of an urban design approach that borrows from the past while adapting to the present and future. The very fact that new urbanists must meet the demands of the marketplace keeps them grounded in reality. Successful new urbanism performs a difficult balancing act by maintaining the integrity of a walkable, human-scale neighborhood while offering modern residential and commercial "product" to compete with conventional suburban development. New urbanists who cannot compete with conventional development or find a niche that is poorly served by the real estate industry are doomed to failure.

The difficulty of that balancing act is one reason why many developers choose to build hybrids, instead of adopting all of the principles of new urbanism. Some new urbanists think that hybrids pose a serious threat to the movement, because they usually borrow the label and language of the new urbanism. Other new urbanists believe that hybrids represent a positive step forward from conventional suburban development.

Defining elements

The heart of new urbanism is in the design of neighborhoods, which can be defined by 13 elements, according to town planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Duany and Plater-Zyberk, a husband-wife team, both studied and met each other at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. While living in one of the Victorian neighborhoods of New Haven, they observed authentic neighborhoods and mixed-use development streetscapes with a tremendous amount of character, corner shops, front porches, and a diversity of well-crafted housing. The experience living in New Haven, one of the most historic cities in the United States, formed the basis of their ideas. An authentic neighborhood contains most of these elements:

1. The neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square or a green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner. A transit stop would be located at this center.
2. Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center, an average of roughly 2,000 feet.
3. There are a variety of dwelling types—usually houses, rowhouses and apartments—so that younger and older people, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy may find places to live.
4. At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.
5. A small ancillary building or garage apartment is permitted within the backyard of each house. It may be used as a rental unit or place to work (for example, office or craft workshop).
6. An elementary school is close enough so that most children can walk from their home.
7. There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling—not more than a tenth of a mile away.
8. Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to any destination.
9. The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.
10. Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.
11. Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.
12. Certain prominent sites at the termination of street vistas or in the neighborhood center are reserved for civic buildings. These provide sites for community meetings, education, and religious or cultural activities.
13. The neighborhood is organized to be self-governing. A formal association debates and decides matters of maintenance, security, and physical change. Taxation is the responsibility of the larger community.

Examples

Although Miami Lakes was built in the 1960s and has many aspects of the movement, Seaside, Florida, the first fully new urbanist town, began development in 1981 on 80 acres (324,000 m²) of Florida Panhandle coastline. Seaside appeared on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in 1988 when only a few streets were completed, and it since became internationally famous for its architecture and the quality of its streets and public spaces. The town appears in the movie The Truman Show as well. Seaside proved that developments that function like traditional resort towns could be built in the postmodern era. Lots began selling for $15,000 in the early 1980s and, slightly over a decade later, lots prices had escalated to about $200,000. Today, most lots sell for more than a million dollars, and houses sometimes top $5 million. The town is now a tourist mecca.

Seaside’s influence has less to do with its economic success than the attractiveness and dynamism related to its physical form. Many developers have visited Seaside and gone away determined to build something similar.

Since Seaside gained recognition, other new urban towns and neighborhoods have been designed and are substantially built—including Legacy Town Center in Plano, Texas; Haile Village Center in Gainesville, Florida; Miami Lakes, Florida; The Peninsula Neighborhood in Iowa City, Iowa; The Village of Ponderosa in West Des Moines, Iowa; West Glen Town Center in West Des Moines, Iowa, Harbor Town in Memphis, Tennessee; Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland; King Farm in Rockville, Maryland; Addison Circle in Addison, Texas; Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon; Mashpee Commons in Mashpee, Massachusetts; The Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi; Celebration and Avalon Park in Orlando, Florida; Southgate in Tallahassee, Florida, Cherry Hill Village in Canton, Michigan, Baxter Village (www.villageofbaxter.com) in Fort Mill, SC, and the redevelopment of Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado as well as the Verrado neighborhood of Buckeye, Arizona.

Designers are also using the principles of new urbanism to build major new projects in cities and towns. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted the principles of the new urbanism in its multibillion dollar program to rebuild public housing projects nationwide. New urbanists have planned and developed hundreds of projects in infill locations. Most were driven by the private sector, but many, including HUD projects, used public money. New urbanist projects built in historic cities and towns includes Crawford Square in Pittsburgh, City Place in West Palm Beach, Highlands Garden Village in Denver, Park DuValle in Louisville, and Beerline B in Milwaukee.

The United States is by no means alone in the "new urbanism" shift; in fact, most of the fundamental ideas stem from European urban design. The river city of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, is also experimenting with small more commercialised developments such as Emporium (a living, shopping, dining mecca), as well as large scale initiatives such as Kelvin Grove Urban Village [2], a University/College, medium and high residential living area, with retail suiting all age groups and budgets. In Europe many brown-field sites have been redeveloped since the 1980s following the models of the traditonal city neighbourhoods rather than Modernist models. However, the well publicised development of Poundbury in England, a village actually owned by Prince Charles, involved a plan, designed by Leon Krier, to expand an existing village. The occupants are mostly the wealthy retired.

One community in Utah in the Salt Lake metropolitan area, Daybreak Community, will house 500,000 residents when it is completed.

Congress for New Urbanism

Leaders in this design trend came together in 1993 to form the Congress for the New Urbanism, based in Chicago. The founders are Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Elizabeth Moule, all practicing architects and town planners. The Congress for the New Urbanism has since grown to more than 2,000 members and is now the leading international organization promoting new urbanist design principles.

Disney builds a town

In June of 1996, Disney unveiled its 5,000 acre (20 km²) town of Celebration, near Orlando, Florida, and it has since eclipsed Seaside as the best-known new urbanist community. In some respects, new urbanism and Disney have been uncomfortable bedfellows. While using designers and principles closely associated with new urbanism, Disney has shunned the label, preferring to call Celebration simply a "town." Meanwhile, the movement may have benefited from all of Celebration’s publicity, but not without a price. Disney has come under attack for what some perceive as heavy-handed rules and management. For those who would attack new urbanism as insipid nostalgia, Disney is a fat target. The fact remains that Celebration’s urban design is generally of high quality and by most accounts serves residents very well.

In the 1991 book Edge City, author Joel Garreau wrote that Americans have not built "a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in 75 years." Celebration was one of the first real estate projects to break that trend, opening its downtown in October, 1996; Seaside's downtown was still mostly unbuilt at the time. Since then, scores of new urban projects have followed suit with their own downtowns and mixed-use districts.

New Pedestrianism

New Pedestrianism (NP), is an urban-planning variant of New Urbanism. Founded by artist, urban designer, and developer Michael E. Arth in 1999, NP has a greater emphasis on ecology, alternative energy, aesthetics, and the separation of cars and pedestrians. A rear street with formal street trees replaces the alley. The front street and sidewalks are replaced with a tree-lined pedestrian lane, generally 12 to 15 feet wide. Houses usually have front porches that overlook the quiet lanes, which can also open into car-free public courtyards, fountains, parks, waterfronts, mixed-use commercial areas, and other amenities. New developments, whether as new neighborhoods or new towns, are planned with vital, mixed-use, car-free village centers. Businesses and residences have a rear (automobile entry) and a front (pedestrian) entry, on two separate transportation networks.

Arth asserts that a vast range of societal and environmental ills could be alleviated with New Pedestrianism: Health and safety is improved by walking or biking in car free lanes, by reduced environmental pollutants, by fewer motor vehicle accidents, and by lowered stress. Energy production is greatly augmented with solar energy, and increased conservation. Wastewater is recycled. Storm water is retained on site where applicable. Utilities are buried. Because of reduced automobile traffic, and because of on-site energy production, there is a reduced dependency on oil. Sprawl, and the traffic associated with it, is reduced. Public transportation becomes feasible because only the nodes comprising the centers of each NP village or neighborhood need be connected. Attractive, close-knit communities also help deter criminal activity.

The Automobile and American Society

To a large extent, New Pedestrianism (as well as New Urbanism) is a reaction to effects of the automobile on the environment and other human-related concerns. Arth writes that our quality of life is highly dependent on the environment, health, aesthetics, noise levels, stress, and community participation, and he often cites these facts and statements as a spur to action:

Americans spend as much of their income (about 20%) on transportation as on housing, with residents of more auto dependent cities spending as much as three times as much of their Gross Regional Product (GRP). People in Houston, Atlanta, Dallas-Ft. Worth spend about 23% of their GRP on transportation compared to 9% in Honolulu, New York City and Baltimore, and 7% in Toronto. These statistics are from the late 90's before the huge runup in oil prices.

According to reports compiled by the NHTSA (National Highway & Traffic Safety Administration), over six million motor vehicle related accidents result in almost three million injuries, and over 42,000 deaths each year in the United States alone (with about half a million deaths worldwide).

To some extent, reliance on the automobile, coupled with the lack of a pedestrian-friendly environment, has resulted in two-thirds of adult Americans being overweight or obese. Americans spend about $33 billion a year trying to lose weight, yet 300,000 still die every year because of weight related problems.

Roads, parking lots, garages, and automobile-related businesses cover a significant portion of the urban and rural landscape resulting in a deleterious effect on the environment and high maintenance costs.

History

Like New Urbanism, New Pedestrianism has its roots in compact, mixed-use neighborhoods common in the United States (and elsewhere) during the first quarter of the 20th century. New Pedestrianism borrows and then expands especially upon experiments in urban design that focused on separating pedestrians from vehicular traffic.

In Venice, California around 1905, "walk streets" were constructed in a few blocks near the beach. Houses faced pedestrian lanes that ranged between sidewalk width and about ten feet wide. Alleys in the rear handled cars. The canals in Venice, California, built during the same period, had both sidewalks and canals in front of the houses.

Urban planners Ebenezer Howard and Sir Patrick Geddes were an ealier influence on the design of Radburn, New Jersey, built at the dawn of the automobile age in 1929. Radburn had pedestrian lanes in front and vehicular access at the rear on cul-de-sacs that protruded into large multi-use blocks. A study done in 1970 by John Lansing of the University of Michigan showed that 47% of its residents did their grocery shopping on foot, compared to 8% for a conventional subdivision nearby. He also determined that, overall, Radburn residents drove far less than in any other areas he studied. The Radburn plan has been copied in various forms in Sweden, England, Japan, New Zealand, and Australia.

The San Antonio River Walk, also known as "Paseo del Rio," was initiated in 1929. In this case, the San Antonio River underwent flood control measures and was turned into a peaceful canal lined on both sides with lively pedestrian promenades, plazas, sidewalk cafes, restaurants, clubs, shops, hotels, and other attractions that are completely separate from any vehicles. The promenades pass underneath the roads since Paseo del Rio is one level below the street and vehicular access to buildings is one story above the river.

Village Homes in Davis, California was founded in 1975 by Michael and Judy Corbett. The 70 acre subdivision has 225 homes and 20 apartments. Solar design and solar panels are utilized for heating. The homes have walkways passing through an extensive greenbelt system on one side of the houses with automobile access on the other side.

Some streets in the New Urbanist development of Rosemary Beach, Florida also have boardwalks in front of houses.

Most recently New Pedestrianism was offered as part of the solution to the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Criticisms

New urbanism is in part a reform movement and, as such, has drawn criticism from all quarters of the political spectrum. Some members of right wing view new urbanism as a collectivist plot designed to rob Americans of their civil freedoms, property rights and free-flowing traffic. Some members of the left wing view new urbanism as an example of capitalistic excess, aligned with forces of greed that would purge the underclass from urban areas for the benefit of the gentrifying elite. Academics have criticized New Urbanism as retrograde, bordering on fascist. Some environmentalists decry new urbanism as nothing more than conventional sprawl dressed up with superficial stylistic cues, while NIMBY activists routinely argue against new urbanism as being too dense, with too much mixed use and around-the-clock activity.

Critics of new urbanism often accuse it of elevating aesthetics over practicality, subordinating good city planning principles to urban design dogma. Another charge is that the movement is grounded in nostalgia for a period in American history that may never have existed. A related charge is that the movement represents nothing truly new, as towns and neighborhoods were built on similar principles in the U.S. until the 1920s. However, perhaps the most frequent criticism of the movement is that some of the highest-profile projects—such as Celebration, Seaside, and The Glen in Glenview, Illinois—represent a form of sprawl themselves, in that they are built on what was previously open space. According to New Urban News, new urbanist developments as a group are approximately one-half infill and one-half greenfield land.

A stream of thought in sustainable development maintains that sustainabilty is primarily based on the combination of high density and transit service. To the extent that many new urbanist developments rely on automobile transport and serve the detached single family housing market, critics claim they fall short of being truly sustainable. However, a forthcoming rating and certification scheme for neighborhood environmental design, LEED-ND, should help to quantify the sustainability of New Urbanist neighborhood design; it is being developed by a partnership between the US Green Building Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Beyond cursory levels, say critics, the provision for cultural and social interchange in new urbanist towns is limited, and the permanent residential populations of new urbanist resort communities are comparatively small and culturally homogeneous. Critics claim that new urbanism is somewhat incomplete: while providing a basic framework for the improvement of the civic landscape, it does not entirely provide for the diversity necessary for city success. Critics call into question whether or not towns and cities are objects that can be "created," or whether they are, in fact, the results of a process of cultural, social, political and religious interaction that the new urbanists seek to accelerate and simulate, in order to make their towns more palatable to their predominantly affluent (and, some argue, nostalgic) clientele.

Along similar lines of critique, New Urbanism is a normative, and not a substantive, approach to environmental design. As being normative, it relies on the exclusivity of norms and standards, and under the growing philosophical pressure of postmodern thought, New Urbanism continues to take a pounding of criticism by many design theorists.

To date, new urbanists have captured only a small share of the residential market, although to be sure, those new urbanist developments that are built are quickly purchased by interested homebuyers. Because they are familiar with the business aspects of the conventional suburban development retail model, particularly the strip mall format, developers continue to build conventional suburban projects, although new urbanist ideals are becoming more pervasive even with the development community.

See also

• Michael E. Arth
• Jane Jacobs
• Leon Krier
• Christopher Alexander
• Andrés Duany
• James Howard Kunstler
• Naked streets

• Smart Growth
• Poundbury
• Sim Van der Ryn
• Transit-Oriented Development
• Carsharing
• Crime prevention through environmental design
• Urban Renaissance
• Urbanism
• Kentlands
• Stapleton International Airport

References

• Brooke, Steven (1995). Seaside. Gretna, La.: Pelican Publishing Company. ISBN 0-88289-997-X
• Calthorpe, Peter (1993). The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. ISBN 1-878271-68-7
• Calthorpe, Peter and William Fulton (2001). The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl. Washington, DC: Island Press. ISBN 1-55963-784-6
• Congress for the New Urbanism (1999). Leccese, Michael; and McCormick, Kathleen (Eds.) (ed.). Charter of the New Urbanism. McGraw-Hill Professional. ISBN 0-07-135553-7.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
• Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; & Alminana, Robert (2003). The New Civic Art: Elements of Town Planning. New York: Rizzoli Publications. ISBN 0-8478-2186-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Duany, Andres; Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth; & Speck, Jeff (2000). Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. North Point Press. ISBN 0-86547-557-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Dutton, John A. (2001). New American Urbanism : Re-forming the Suburban Metropolis. Milano: Skira editore. ISBN 88-8118-741-8
• El Nasser, Haya (November 14 2005). "Miss. Wal-Marts may apply 'new urbanism' in rebuilding". USA Today. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
• Jacobs, Jane (1992). The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books. ISBN 0-679-74195-X. Originally published: New York: Random House, (1961).
• Katz, Peter (1994). The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community. New York: McGraw-Hill. ISBN 0-07-033889-2
• Kunstler, James Howard (1994). Geography Of Nowhere: The Rise And Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-88825-0
• Talen, Emily (2005). New Urbanism & American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-70133-3.

External links

• American Planning Association New Urbanism Division
• Bicycle Diaries - Street Ballet, Part II, and Part III
• Congress for the New Urbanism
• A Critique of New Urbanism in Harvard Design Magazine
• A Critique of New Urbanism in Reason Magazine
• Image gallery of New Urbanist/TND communities on Cyburbia
• New Pedestrianism
• New Urban News
• New Urban News List of Neighborhood-Scale Communities
• New Urbanism.org A personal site not affiliated with the Congress for the New Urbanism (ref. http://www.batesline.com/archives/002761.html)
• "Nonconforming Uses: Architect Teddy Cruz at the Borders of Tomorrow" by Rebecca Solnit
• PlaceMakers' SmartCode files A model new urbanist planning code
• Timeline of New Urbanism
• Subdivided A Documentary Film with sections on New Urbanism and an interview with Andres Duany media
• Town Paper Links List of TNDs

Kentlands