Everything about New Urbanism totally explained
New urbanism is an American
urban design movement that arose in the early
1980s. Its goal is to reform many 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 can include
(neo)traditional neighborhood design and
transit-oriented development.
In 1991, 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 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.
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 3,000 members, and is the leading international organization promoting new urbanist design principles. It holds annual Congresses in various U.S. cities.
The CNU's
Charter of the New Urbanism says:
regional planning for open space, context-appropriate
architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe their strategies can 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 redevelopment 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. 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, and automobile use per capita has soared.
The suburban working poor spend a large portion of their incomes on cars, and the mobility of those who can't 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.
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're 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. 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 1/4 mile or 1,320 feet (0.4 km).
- 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
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 infrequently 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.
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.
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.
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 internationally famous for its architecture, and the quality of its streets and public spaces.
Seaside is now a tourist destination and appeared 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.
The design emphasizes a pedestrian orientation 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, a 451-student public high school (grades 9-12) that's a
charter school.
By the end of
2006, about 2,500 houses and more than 300 apartments had been built on the Stapleton site. When complete in about 15 years, it's expected to provide 8,000 houses, 4,000 apartments, 4 schools and 2 million square feet (180,000 m²) of retail space. Up to 30,000 people could live there.
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. It was originally started 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.
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. One well-publicized example is
Poundbury in
England, a suburban extension to the town of Dorchester, which was built on land owned by the
Duchy of Cornwall under the overview of
Prince Charles. The original masterplan was designed by
Leon Krier. A report carried out after the first phase of construction found a high degree of satisfaction by residents, although the aspirations to reduce
car dependency hadn't been successful. Rising house prices and a perceived premium have made the open market housing unaffordable for many local people.
The
Council for European Urbanism (C.E.U.), formed in 2003, shares many of the same aims as the US New Urbanists. C.E.U.'s Charter is a development of the
Congress for the New Urbanism Charter revised and reorganised to relate better to European conditions. An Australian organisation,
Australian Council for New Urbanism has since 2001 run conferences and events to promote new urbanism in that country. A
New Zealand Urban Design Protocol was created by the Ministry for the Environment in 2005.
In the
United Kingdom New Urbanist and European urbanism principles are practiced and taught by the
The Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment. Other organisations promote New Urbanism as part of their remit, such as
INTBAU,
A Vision of Europe, and others.
There are many developments around the world that follow New Urbanist principles to a greater or lesser extent:
McKenzie Towne is a new urbanist development attempted by Carma Developers LP in Calgary.
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.
Jakriborg, in Southern Sweden, is a recent example of the new urbanist movement.
Other developments can be found in Heulebrugge, the Netherlands; Knokke-Heist, in Belgium; and Fonti di Matilde, Italy.
There are several such developments in South Africa. The most notable is Melrose Arch in Johannesburg. The first development in the Eastern Cape, one of the lesser known provinces in the country, is located in East London. The development, announced in 2007, comprises 30 hectares. It is made up of three apartment complexes together with over 30 residential site as well as 20,000 sqm of residential and office space. The development is valued at over R2-billion ($250 million).
New Urbanism in Film
The 1998 fantasy comedy-drama film directed by Peter Weir starring Jim Carrey as Truman Burbank, used the real life New Urbanist town of Seaside, Florida as the setting for a perfect, fictional town constructed as a set for a television show. The documentary, The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004) argues that the depletion of oil will result in the demise of the sprawl-type development. New Urban Cowboy: Toward a New Pedestrianism, a feature length 2008 documentary about urban designer Michael E. Arth, explains the principles of New Urbanism, gives a brief history of the movement, and chronicles the rebuilding of an inner city slum into a model of New Urbanism. The film promotes a more ecology and pedestrian-oriented branch of New Urbanism called New Pedestrianism that Arth founded in 1999.
Criticisms
Perhaps the most frequent criticism of the movement is that the most famous and highest-profile projects most associated with the movement (primarily Celebration, Kentlands, and Seaside) are all greenfield projects built on what was previously open space and therefore are just another form of sprawl. Critics react to this as a controlled sprawl that assumes that social situations can and should also be controlled, such that preconceived rules of what a town need be are first worked out on paper and then acted out in real space. Often the results are elitist and exclusionary, and are almost always conservative in nature.
Critics accuse the new urbanism movement of elevating aesthetics over practicality, subordinating good urban 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.
The New Urbanist principle of mixed-income developments as a means of ameliorating poverty lacks evidence which supports that this is achieved. The theoretical basis for addressing poverty through mixed-income development posits that planned mixed-income developments facilitate the bridging of social capital, and thus a higher shared quality of life across socioeconomic cleavages.
Academics have criticized New Urbanism as retrograde, bordering on fascist. 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.
The New Urbanist preference for 'permeable' street grids has been criticised on the grounds that it gives private motor vehicles an advantage over walking, cycling and public transport. The transport performance of some New Urbanist developments, such as Poundbury have been disappointing, with surveys revealing high levels of car use 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. 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.
Further Information
Get more info on 'New Urbanism'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://new_urbanism.totallyexplained.com">New Urbanism Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
