Design matters: the city and the good life: can the art of traditional urban design be renewed, and can we relearn how to create beautiful and livable cities?

Christian Century, April 19, 2003 by Philip Bess

The cultural ideal and reality of suburban sprawl are perhaps most insidious in the way they undermine the formal and cultural patterns--the urban patterns--by means of which human beings have traditionally sought to achieve the good life. The postwar suburban ideal caters to the illusion that unpleasantness in life can be avoided. Christians especially should understand that unpleasantness in life cannot be avoided.

In contrast to suburbia, the traditional city is a complex institution designed to address and transform the unpleasant aspects of human life by means of community, culture and civil society. To live in a civitas is to be civilized. To live in a polis one must learn to be polite, perhaps even to acquire some polish. Urbanites sometimes become urbane.

I am contrasting two formal paradigms of human settlement: the traditional town or traditional urban neighborhood and the post-1945 automobile-dependent suburb. My division of history at the year 1945 may seem extravagant or simplistic, but that year effectively represents the temporal demarcation between the routine creation of walkable human settlements and the creation of those that require mechanical transportation to perform the majority of life's daily tasks.

With other members of the Congress for New Urbanism, I contend that the mixed-use walkable neighborhood is the sine qua non of urban design and that it ought to be a focus of both public policy and urban planning, whether such neighborhoods are considered in isolation or in relation to other neighborhoods. A neighborhood standing alone in the landscape is a village; several neighborhoods in the landscape constitute a town; many contiguous neighborhoods in the landscape together constitute a city or a metropolis. To make traditional villages, towns, neighborhoods and cities today--like the places we love to visit (villages and towns like Cooperstown and Key West; small cities like Annapolis, Savannah and Santa Barbara; and big cities with distinctive neighborhoods like Boston, New York and Chicago)--requires a conscious and conscientious rejection of the way we've been making human settlements since 1945.

WE CAN IDENTIFY at least four kinds of order in a good city: an ecological order: an economic order, a moral order and a formal order. A good city clearly is part of an ecological order--it is a means by which humans live over an extended period in the natural landscape. If the city is made well, both the human animal and the ecological order of which it is part will thrive. If the city is not made well, both humans and the ecological order will eventually suffer.

The economic order of a good city is characterized by marketplace diversity and entrepreneurial freedom. Its purpose is twofold: to create and distribute the material goods and services necessary to the material well-being of the populace, and to create the surplus wealth, and hence the leisure, necessary for the various kinds of cultural endeavors--music, art, scholarship, sport--that are the hallmarks of civilization.