It Takes a Village: In praise of the New Urbanism

National Review, July 14, 2003 by Catesby Leigh

Nate Bowman first broke ground on Vermillion, his 350-acre North Carolina village, over four years ago, and since then only one of its four neighborhoods has been built. Even at this stage, though, he's got a lot to brag about. Rather than the usual suburban monoculture, Bowman has erected a traditional neighborhood with an array of different building types. Vermillion offers single-family houses, townhouses, live-work units, and duplexes. An empty site in this first neighborhood has been earmarked for a church.

Designed by the pioneering New Urbanist firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. of Miami, Vermillion is rising on the once-neglected east side of Huntersville, a rapidly growing suburb of Charlotte. The village is the first in this metropolitan area to offer townhouses and live-work units. Inspired by James Oglethorpe's Savannah plan, the neighborhood square boasts appealing Federal-style brick townhouses with tall, triple-hung second-story windows facing a green. One corner harbors the two-story commercial building where Bowman works, a bar and grill, and a dry cleaner and interior-decoration business with residences above.

Bowman could have gotten a quicker return on the purchase of this land, which includes a creek and about 60 acres reserved for a park, by plopping down a low-density tract-house development. Going the New Urbanist route is both slower and riskier. Still, Bowman just might end up making several times more money than he would have following the tract-house formula-by providing a higher-quality, finer-grained community that offers a range of residential densities. This approach to real estate is profoundly countercultural, accounting for only a tiny fraction of the property development currently underway in the United States.

But the New Urbanism is only two decades old, and it is gaining momentum. It forms part of a broad recovery of tradition in civic design now taking place in the United States-a recovery that will reach into the heart of our major metropolitan centers. Classical visions of the rebuilt World Trade Center site are emerging that differ sharply from the expressionistic mayhem offered by Daniel Libeskind, the city's officially anointed architect. Such visions may not be realized at Ground Zero, but their time will come. To understand why historic approaches to shaping the urban environment are on the rebound, however, we should start with a look at modernism's most significant creation: postwar suburbia.

Suburbia is an American paradox. In some respects, it is deeply ingrained in our history; in others, it is a very radical phenomenon. "Over 80 percent of America has been built since World War II, and it's not pretty," John Montague Massengale, architect and co-author of New York 1900: Metropolitan Architecture and Urbanism, 1890-1915, recently noted. In this newly built America, the use of buildings or even trees to define and configure urban space has largely disappeared. The modernist notion of a house, office tower, or retail outlet as a spatially isolated entity ignores the role architectural ensembles (like the houses facing Vermillion's neighborhood square) should play in shaping the built environment.

The "object in space" blueprint has historical precedents in America's isolated frontier settlements, but its extension to the urban environment as a whole-including countless redevelopment and "urban renewal" projects undertaken in the core cities in recent decades-began with Le Corbusier's Radiant City scheme of the 1920s. This proto- Orwellian vision of huge, inhuman towers situated on super-blocks in the city center, with low horizontal slabs in leafy settings on the periphery, forms the unsettling backdrop to federal and local officials' broad recalibration of American urban planning, during the 1950s, from a pedestrian scale to an automotive one.

Thus the idea that suburbia is a spontaneous, market-driven phenomenon is completely false. Suburbia, moreover, is not designed. Traditional, three-dimensional civic design, an empirical art developed over millennia-and which, in this country, shaped urban environments ranging from Williamsburg, Charleston, and Savannah to Rockefeller Center-was superseded by the bubble diagram relegating the shopping malls, office parks, government centers, and residential tracts of the spatially disintegrated postwar city to their respective precincts. In turn, the qualitative dimension of urbanism was discarded in favor of quantitative criteria: the amount of traffic or parking that must be accommodated, the number of residential units per acre, the ratio of above-grade habitable space to the surface area of a commercial lot.

The resulting environment is characterized by a more or less undifferentiated low-density, low-quality urban tissue that is, in Frank Lloyd Wright's prophetic words, "everywhere or nowhere." The city becomes an indeterminate phenomenon, devoid of civic character or even distinct physical identity. Postwar suburbia is thus curiously attuned to the postmodern chimera of individual self-invention. Its denizens, as historian Robert Fishman has written, "create their own 'cities,'" with their own personal sets of destinations. In this environment one doesn't encounter great civic monuments, not to speak of great civic architecture. And the generally abysmal quality of public space contrasts with the luxurious kitchens, media rooms, master bedrooms, and bathrooms-tokens of what the New Urbanist architect Philip Bess has called "America's true growth industry, the care and tending of the autonomous self."