Designing the city

Christian Century, June 20, 2001 by Norman B. Bendroth

NEW URBANISTS want streets to be places to I walk, chat with neighbors, ride bikes and drive cars. Streets should be narrow and versatile, serving to slow down cars, not speed them up. The traditional grid pattern of most urban neighborhoods is the best way to achieve these goals. A network of straight streets at right angles gives drivers choices if the road they are on is clogged, as there are multiple paths between destinations. This is in stark contrast to the serpentine roads and cul de sacs of the typical suburban housing development, where drivers have only one route out of the development to a collector road. This same road also serves many other developments before funneling all traffic onto a main artery or highway. This kind of design limits the number of routes available and creates traffic congestion even though there is more road surface.

New Urbanists want buildings to be organized according to type and scale, not use. Thus, a coffee shop with apartments above it, a corner drug store, hardware store and grocery store can all be part of a neighborhood. Affordable, middle-income and high-income housing should be built in the same neighborhood and share a common vocabulary of building forms and materials.

New Urbanists also want special sites for special buildings. They argue that churches, libraries, town halls and schools should be the visual and actual center of public life. By having a prominent place in the neighborhood--at a terminating vista, or at the end of a block these buildings signal that communal space takes priority over commercial or residential places.

The New Urbanists are not without their critics. The libertarian Cato Institute has accused them of social engineering and of overregulating private property and new development. The first high-profile New Urbanist project (and also the setting for the movie The Truman Show) was Seaside, Florida, an 80-acre parcel designed by a Florida developer who wanted to re-create the fond memories of boyhood summers spent in quaint wooden cottages by the shore. When it opened, Seaside drew fire from liberals who viewed it as precious and contrived--another version of suburbia for the rich. They contended that the restrictions on design limited variety and encouraged the blandness they were trying to get away from. Wasn't this just a reworking of a Norman Rockwell fantasy of small-town America and an uncritical return to turn-of-the-century architectural forms?

IF NEW URBANISM is such a good idea, ask other critics, why are so many older neighborhoods that follow its design principles in decline? And is there really a market for these kinds of mixed-use neighborhoods? Isn't the growth of segmented suburbia proof that people like surburbia?

Peter Calthorpe, a pioneer in the development of transit-oriented and "village" planning, agrees that earlier forms of the New Urbanism were largely new versions of sprawl rather than alternatives to it. They were often developed on suburban greenfields at relatively low densities and ended up being quite expensive, thus offering nothing more than another escape for the well-to-do.