When Long Island's professional hockey team, the
Islanders, won the Stanley Cup a few years ago,
they faced a revealing dilemma: There was literally
no public place -- no square, commons, or grand
boulevard -- for them to parade on. Instead, they were
reduced to driving around in circles in a mall parking
lot. For most Long Islanders, suburban life has been a
step up. But something was lost on the way.
There is an unavoidable tension between the power of
place and "automobility." The latter undermines the
former. The automobile provided an escape first from
the stultifying confines of small-town life and then from
the sweltering density of the inner cities. The auto, like
the telegraph and telephone before it and radio, television,
and the Internet in its wake, freed individuals from
their local confines while knitting the country together
in a web of highways.
A century later, the American love affair with the automobile
shows no sign of waning. We still value the
auto as much as an expression of individuality as a
means of conveyance. What's changed is that the country
is increasingly aware of what has been lost. New
technologies that connect distant individuals also disconnect
people from their local surroundings.
The New Urbanism movement speaks to the sense
that the balance between pride of place and personal
mobility has come undone. The whole point of the New
Urbanism, explains architect Elizabeth Moule, sounding
like a communitarian, is to "build a public realm that
will sustain the democratic life."
The New Urbanists, who originally called themselves
the "Neo-traditionalists," are unabashed critics of post-World
War II urban and suburban development. Deeply
influenced by the turn of the century City Beautiful
movement, they disparage:
smaller houses on smaller plots, to produce the
density necessary to reduce dependence on autos.
While criticism of suburban formlessness is a half-century
old, the New Urbanism has a brief history. In the early
1980s pioneering architects Andres Duany and Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk built the first full-scale Neo-traditional
project, Seaside in Florida. A decade later the Ahwahnee
Principles, the first formal statement of the New Urbanism,
were issued. In 1993 the Congress for a New Urbanism
was created. Today the CNU boasts 1,800 members
and includes not only architects but business executives,
real estate developers, and prominent mayors such as
John Norquist of Milwaukee, Roxanne Qualls of Cincinnati,
and Brett Schundler of Jersey City, N.J.
The New Urbanists confound our conventional categories.
Routinely denounced as liberal elitists, they
enjoy the support of conservative Paul Weyrich, a proponent
of public transit. The architectural left denounces
the movement as "the new suburbanism," a drive to impose
reactionary aesthetics in order to advance (heaven
forbid!) a middle-class notion of the good life.
Harvard's Alex Krieger thinks the New Urbanism is a
fad: "They practically blame the loss of community on
flat roofs and horizontally proportioned windows."
Meanwhile, libertarians see the heavy hand of planning
in the New Urbanism. Still others see the New Urbanists'
emphasis on increasing housing density as the city revenging
itself on the suburbs by making them as crowded
and congested as the places people left behind.
The New Urbanism was vulnerable to many of these
critiques in its early years. Even as its leaders denounced
traditional zoning, they demanded remarkably detailed
codes to impose their aesthetic. In the name of community,
they insisted that their vision be inscribed in every
architectural detail of "their" towns. They worried about
how their ideas might be watered down by non-New
Urbanist developers appropriating elements of their
style, such as front porches and Victorian street lamps.
Plater-Zyberk told a group of planners that it was better
not to try the New Urbanism than to do it halfway. "The
middle ground," she said, "will reinforce the worst characteristics
of each type."
But the zealotry associated with the early utopian efforts
has faded as New Urbanism's influence has expanded.
The New Urbanists' concern over sprawl and historical
preservation has converged with the country's new-found
concern over these same issues. Perhaps just as
important, their aesthetic appeals to a rapidly increasing
share of the public. The most popular trend in retail design
is to build malls that look like traditional town centers.
The New Urbanists are experiencing a "bewildered
sense of triumph," says Alan Ehrenhalt, the editor of
Governing magazine.
Today most New Urbanists are working in cities and
suburbs, not green fields. Master plans drawn up by
Duany and Plater-Zyberk's firm DPZ helped to revive
both West Palm Beach, Fla., and Providence, R.I. Now
the duo is involved in trying to renew Baton Rouge, La.
New Urbanist projects have been completed or are
under way in big cities like Milwaukee and Baltimore
and smaller cities like Port Huron, Mich., Ardmore,
Okla., and Eureka, Calif.
All across the Atlanta metro area, towns and counties
strangled by traffic and struggling to comply with new
federal clean-air standards are contentiously debating
New Urbanist-inspired reforms of their zoning codes.
Residents of Cherokee County, Ga., made famous by
Tom Wolfe's book A Man in Full, are balking at the idea
of living with increased density. This sentiment may
prove to be the source of the most serious resistance to
the New Urbanism.
In an influential essay entitled "The New Urbanism:
Hope or Hype for American Communities," William
Fulton, the author of The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics
of Urban Growth in Los Angeles, concluded that the movement
could probably never occupy more than a niche
market. But what is clear is that suburban Americans are
increasingly open to the New Urbanism. A survey by
American Lives, a San Francisco based marketing firm,
found widespread interest among home buyers for what
Eli Lehrer, a writer on urban affairs, describes as "market
urbanism." According to the survey, only 30 percent
of home buyers like the suburbs as they exist today.
Sixty percent are dissatisfied with the suburbs and
would be attracted to a town featuring some design elements
associated with the New Urbanism, such as a
town center and community gathering places.
To get personal for a moment, the survey found that
most buyers want what my neighborhood in Brooklyn,
built as a turn of the century suburb, offers -- options. I
can walk to stores and take a subway to work, but I also
have a driveway for the family car. The home buyers
surveyed by American Lives, like the residents of
Cherokee County in suburban Atlanta, do balk at the reduction
of privacy that would come with higher densities.
But that is a solvable design problem that, says
Brooke Warrick of American Lives, the New Urbanist
designers have not yet tackled.
What home buyers dislike about most suburbs is the
absence of a public life. What they fear about the New
Urbanism is the loss of private life. What they want is
the delicate equilibrium of an open community. It's an
almost unachievable goal, but one worth striving for.
Jonathan Miller, vice president of Lend Lease Real
Estate Investments in Manhattan, one of the country's
largest institutional investors, is bullish on the ideas behind
the New Urbanism. He foresees the reconstruction
along New Urbanist lines of not only older decaying
cities, but of superannuated strip malls and decaying industrial
suburbs.
During the middle of a contentious and by all accounts
near-theological debate about the New Urbanism
at a recent Harvard conference, Mayor Qualls of
Cincinnati mounted a challenge. "If someone has a better
alternative," she said, "bring it to us, because we are
in need of things that work." So far that challenge has
gone unanswered.
