It Takes a Village: In praise of the New Urbanism

National Review, July 14, 2003 by Catesby Leigh

So financial reforms are needed, along with a reform of land-use regulation. On the latter front, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have recently developed an alternative, traditionally oriented "SmartCode." (A model version is posted at Smartcode.org.) The architects call the spectrum of natural and human habitats the Transect. They have accordingly codified a range of environments reflecting the classical hierarchy of wilderness (which has not been altered by man), rural landscape (which has), suburb, town, and city. Based on the Transect, the SmartCode "integrates the range of planning concerns from the region, through the community scale, to the individual building."

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are attuned to a great tradition that has equipped designers not only with practical planning principles but also with rules of decorum, of appropriateness, pertaining to different human environments. Under the SmartCode, big-city streets have sidewalks, curbs and gutters, and elegant streetlights; country roads have swales and lights on wooden posts or no lights at all. Under this code, it is not traditional neighborhoods but functional precincts with "negative social or environmental consequences"-e.g., drive-thru restaurants, big-box retail, junkyards, municipal dumps, prisons-that are treated as nonconforming uses requiring special permission.

The Transect has shaped the design of Vermillion, where the residential density increases from the spacious lots with detached homes along the neighborhood edge (which borders on parkland) to the townhouses in the square, and where the siding with which peripheral dwellings are clad gives way to brick in the square's more formal setting. The Transect could also have a significant impact on at least some of America's metropolitan regions in the decades ahead.

The SmartCode's practical advantages should not be underestimated. It is straightforward and prescriptive, and encourages automatic permitting for development projects rather than bureaucratic red tape. And because it prescribes the three-dimensional character not only of a given building but also of its surroundings, the SmartCode would make life a lot easier for a developer working in the city core, by allowing him to know what will be going up around the block. Officials at all levels of government should do what they can to level the playing field for competition between two very distinct approaches to shaping the human environment by making sure the SmartCode approach is an option for local communities-which, of course, should have the final say on land-use issues.

On the whole, New Urbanist communities have been financially successful, some spectacularly so. There is a repressed demand out there, because the cultural memory of many, many Americans does embrace historic towns, with their legible hierarchy of churches, courthouses, a city hall, schools, commercial buildings, and residences, along with their orderly arrangement of public squares, parks, and streets. They know that for all they've gained with suburban living-less expensive land and more spacious housing, non-stop bargains at large retail stores that thrive (just as Frank Lloyd Wright predicted they would) on the urban edge thanks to truck-based distribution networks, generally less meddlesome government, and decent schools-they've lost some precious amenities as well.