New Urbanism

New urbanism is an American urban design movement that arose in the early 1980s. Its goal is to reform all aspects of real estate development and urban planning, from urban retrofits to suburban infill. New urbanist neighborhoods are designed to contain a diverse range of housing and jobs, and to be walkable.

New Urbanism is also known as traditional neighborhood design, neotraditional design, and transit-oriented development. A more idealistic variant of New Urbanism, founded in 1999 by Michael E. Arth, is known as New Pedestrianism. The ideas of New Urbanism also are embraced by the European Urban Renaissance movement.

The Local Government Commission, a private nonprofit group in Sacramento, California, invited architects Peter Calthorpe, Michael Corbett, Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Daniel Solomon in 1991 to develop a set of community principles for land use planning. Named the Ahwahnee Principles (after Yosemite National Park's Ahwahnee Hotel), the commission presented the principles to about one hundred government officials in the fall of 1991, at its first Yosemite Conference for Local Elected Officials.

Market Street, downtown Celebration, Florida

Calthorpe, Duany, Moule, Plater-Zyberk, Polyzoides, and Solomon founded the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993. The CNU has grown to more than 2,000 members, and is the leading international organization promoting new urbanist design principles. It held its fifteenth congress in 2007 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which included applying New Urbanist principles to older cities.

The CNU's Charter of the New Urbanism says:

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

New urbanists support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe their strategies are the best way to reduce traffic congestion, increase the supply of affordable housing, and rein in urban sprawl. The Charter of the New Urbanism also covers issues such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the renovation of brownfield land.

Background

Through the first quarter of the twentieth century, cities in the United States were developed in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods, as in European cities. That pattern began to change when cheap rapid transit enabled the emergence of streetcar suburbs, modern architecture, zoning codes, and the ascension of the automobile.

A new system of development with a rigorous separation of uses, known as suburban development, or pejoratively as urban sprawl, arose after World War II. The majority of U.S. citizens now live in suburban communities built in the last fifty years. Suburban development consumes large areas of countryside for a relatively small population, and automobile use per capita has soared.

The suburban working poor must spend a large portion of their incomes on cars, and the mobility of those who cannot drive is significantly restricted in areas without good public transportation. Strip malls, auto-oriented civic and commercial buildings, and subdivisions without much individuality or character dominate the landscape.

The new urbanism is a reaction to sprawl, based on planning and architectural principles working together to create human-scale, walkable communities. It is rooted in the work of architects, planners, and theorists who believed that conventional planning thought was failing.

Social philosopher and historian Lewis Mumford criticized the "anti-urban" development of post-war America. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, written by Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s, called for planners to reconsider the single-use housing projects, large car-dependent thoroughfares, and segregated commercial centers that had become the "norm."

In the 1970s and 1980s, New Urbanism emerged with the urban visions and theoretical models for the reconstruction of the "European" city proposed by architect Leon Krier, and the "pattern language" theories of Christopher Alexander. These eventually coalesced into a unified group in the 1990s.

The New Urbanism includes traditional architects and those with modernist sensibilities. Some work exclusively on infill projects, others focus on transit-oriented development, some attempt to transform the suburbs, and many work in all these categories. All believe in the power and ability of traditional neighborhoods to restore functional, sustainable communities.

New Urbanist developments are purchased quickly by interested home buyers, but have captured only a small share of the residential market. Developers continue to build conventional suburban projects, because they are more familiar with the conventional suburban development retail model, particularly the strip mall format.

Defining elements

The husband-wife team of town planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, met at Princeton University while undergraduates and their beliefs coalesced while at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven. While living in one of New Haven's Victorian neighborhoods, they observed mixed-use streetscapes with corner shops, front porches, and a diversity of well-crafted housing. According to Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the heart of New Urbanism is in the design of neighborhoods, which can be defined by thirteen elements:

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.
Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center, an average of roughly 2,000 feet.
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.
At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.
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, an office or craft workshop).
An elementary school is close enough so that most children can walk from their home.
There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling — not more than a tenth of a mile away.
Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to any destination.
The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.
Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.
Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.
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.
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.

Old and new urbanism

While New Urbanism has elements of nostalgia for pre-automobile urban environments, the replication of such physical or social environments is not possible. Rather, new urbanism is intended to foster walkable, human-scaled urban environments, while offering a modern residential and commercial "product" competitive with conventional suburban development.

File:Sprawltownroadplan.gif

A sprawl road plan at top is contrasted with a more traditional, but modified, interconnecting grid system at bottom

The demands of the marketplace present new urbanists with significant conundrums. For example, to what extent must new houses within neighborhoods serve the market for the kind of living spaces that standard suburban tract homes offer? If walking, cycling and public transit are to be the primary transportation modes, then must all stores and businesses have parking provision comparable to auto-dependent suburbs?

With careful design, large office, light industrial, and even "big box" retail buildings can be incorporated within a walkable new urbanist neighborhood. The design and provision of parking facilities needs particular attention, given that a primary aim is to reduce auto-dependency. One effective way to do this is to balance investments in public transit with reduced incentives for auto use, matters not often under the control of the designers of neighborhoods.

New urbanism also is beginning to impact 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. However, such moves are unlikely on their own to be effective in shifting transfers from automobiles to more environmentally and socially sustainable forms of transportation.

Projects that adopt some new urbanism principles, but remain largely conventional in design, are known as hybrids. Some new urbanists think such hybrids pose a serious threat to the movement, because they usually borrow the label and language of the new urbanism, creating confusion about the meaning of the terms.

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

Examples

U.S.A.

The new urbanism is having a growing influence on how and where metropolitan regions choose to grow. At least fourteen 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.

More than six hundred new towns, villages, and neighborhoods in the U.S. following new urbanism principles, are planned or under construction. Hundreds of new, small-scale, urban and suburban infill projects are restoring the urban fabric of cities and towns, by re-establishing walkable streets and blocks. In Maryland and several other states, new urbanist principles are an integral part of smart growth legislation.

Seaside

Seaside, Florida, the first fully new urbanist town, began development in 1981 on eighty acres (324,000 m²) of Florida Panhandle coastline. It was featured on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in 1988, when only a few streets were completed, and has become famous internationally for its architecture, and the quality of its streets and public spaces.

Seaside proved that developments that function similarly to traditional resort towns could be built in the postmodern era. Seaside is now a tourist mecca, and appears in the movie The Truman Show. Lots sold for $15,000 in the early 1980s, and slightly over a decade later, the price had escalated to about $200,000. Today, most lots sell for more than a million dollars, and some houses top $5 million.

Stapleton

The site of the former Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado, closed in 1995, is now being redeveloped by Forest City Enterprises as the largest new urbanist project in the United States. Construction began in 2001. The new community is zoned for residential and commercial development, including office parks and "big box" shopping centers. Stapleton is by far the largest neighborhood in the city of Denver and an eastern portion of the redevelopment site lies in the neighboring city of Aurora.

By design it emphasizes a pedestrian-oriented design rather than the automobile-oriented designs found in many other planned developments. Nearly a third of the airport site was set aside for public parks and open space.

Stapleton is the site of the Denver School for Science and Technology (DSST), a first-of-its-kind highly innovative 451-student public charter high school (grades 9-12).^[1]

By the end of 2006, about 2,500 houses and more than 300 apartments already had been built on the Stapleton site.^[2] When complete in about 15 years, it is expected to provide 8,000 houses, 4,000 apartments, four schools and 2 million square feet (180,000 m²) of retail. Up to 30,000 people could live there.^[3] Northfield Stapleton, one of the development's major retail centers, recently opened.

All of Stapleton's airport infrastructure has been removed except for the control tower and a parking structure which remain standing as a reminder of the site's former days.

Haile Plantation

Haile Plantation, Florida, is a 2,600 household (1,700 acre) development of regional impact southwest of the City of Gainesville, within Alachua County. Haile Village Center is a traditional neighborhood center within the development. Originally starting in 1978 and completed in 2007. In addition to the 2,600 homes the neighborhood consists of two merchant centers (one a new england narrow street village and the other a chain grocery strip mall). There are also two public elementary schools and an 18 hole golf course.

Disney's Celebration, Florida

In June of 1996, the Walt Disney Company unveiled its 5,000 acre (20 km²) town of Celebration, near Orlando, Florida. Celebration opened its downtown in October, 1996, while Seaside's downtown was still mostly unbuilt. It has since eclipsed Seaside as the best-known new urbanist community, but Disney shuns the label, calling Celebration simply a "town." Disney has been criticized for insipid nostalgia, and heavy-handed rules and management.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted the principles of the new urbanism in its multi-billion 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.

Other countries

Europeans may consider a "New Urbanism" project in the USA as simply traditional city planning. In Europe many brown-field sites have been redeveloped since the 1980s following the models of the traditional city neighbourhoods rather than Modernist models, however, the well publicised development of Poundbury in England, a small village owned by Prince Charles, involved a plan designed by Leon Krier, to expand the existing village into a small town. Only small sections of the plan have been carried out, and the new occupants are mostly the wealthy retired.

The river city of Brisbane, Australia, also is 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 [1], a University/College, medium and high residential living area, with retail suiting all age groups and budgets.

A "new urbanist" development called McKenzie Towne was attempted by Carma Developers LP in Calgary, Alberta.

The Alta de Lisboa project, in north Lisbon, Portugal, is one of the largest new urbanist projects in Europe.

The structure plan for Thimphu, Bhutan, follows Principles of Intelligent Urbanism, which share underlying axioms with the New Urbanism.

Criticisms

Perhaps the most frequent criticism of the movement is that some of the highest-profile projects — such as Celebration, Kentlands, and Seaside — are built on what was previously open space, and therefore, are another form of sprawl. But this criticism is mitigated by the fact that approximately half of New Urbanist developments are infill developments. New urbanist developments are also generally higher in density, and include features that increase walkability. New Urbanist developments, especially the New Pedestrianism variant, are less sprawl-inducing than typical post WWII development.

Critics accuse the new urbanism of elevating aesthetics over practicality, subordinating good city planning principles to dogma. Some charge the movement is grounded in nostalgia for a period in American (and to a certain extent, European) 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.

Academics have criticized New Urbanism as retrograde, bordering on fascist.^[4] Some environmentalists decry new urbanism as nothing more than conventional sprawl dressed up with superficial stylistic cues. Some activists argue that the New Urbanism is too dense, with too much mixed use and around-the-clock activity.

A stream of thought in sustainable development maintains that sustainabilty is based primarily on the combination of high density and transit service. Critics claim many new urbanist developments fall short of being truly sustainable, to the extent that they rely on automobile transport, and serve the detached single family housing market. Many new urbanists claim that this is an incentive that prepare people in transition from conventional suburban living to going back to downtown living.^{[citation needed]}

A forthcoming rating and certification scheme for neighborhood environmental design, LEED-ND, being developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Congress for the New Urbanism, should help to quantify the sustainability of New Urbanist neighborhood design.

New urbanism has drawn both praise ^[5] and criticism from all quarters of the political spectrum. Some members of the right wing view new urbanism as a collectivist plot designed to rob Americans of their civil freedoms, property rights, and free-flowing traffic. ^[6] Some members of the left wing view new urbanism as an example of capitalistic excess, aligned with forces of greed and racism that would intentionally or unintentionally purge residents of color and the underclass from their historical neighborhoods by raising property values far beyond their pre-urban renewal rates.

Footnotes

^ DSST Web site
^ Stapleton Web Site
^ http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-26-100-million_x.htm USA Today
^ New Urbanism: Comprehensive Report & Best Practices Guide. Ithaca, NY: Robert Steuteville. 2001. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
^ "The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems" by Michael E. Arth, Labor IX. link to article
^ "Plan Obsolescence," Reason, June 1998: http://www.reason.com/news/show/30660.html

References

Arth, Michael E., The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems. 2007 Online edition. Labor IX: Urbanism Link to book
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.
Tagliaventi, Gabriele (2002). New Urbanism. Florence: Alinea. ISBN 88-8125-602-9.

External links

[1] DSST Web site

[2] Stapleton Web Site

[3] ttp://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-26-100-million_x.htm USA Today

[4] New Urbanism: Comprehensive Report & Best Practices Guide. Ithaca, NY: Robert Steuteville. 2001. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

[5] "The Labors of Hercules: Modern Solutions to 12 Herculean Problems" by Michael E. Arth, Labor IX. link to article

[6] "Plan Obsolescence," Reason, June 1998: http://www.reason.com/news/show/30660.html

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