New Urban Paradigm (Paraurbanism)

Definition

Goldberger's term for the emerging late-twentieth-century model of urban life that replaces the traditional dense city: a "paraurbanism or pseudo-urbanism" characterised by valuing automobile access over pedestrian accommodation and by combining suburban convenience with selected benefits of the traditional city, while avoiding its mixing of populations. "Providing some measure of urban experience without encouraging the mixing of different kinds of people might be said to be the new urban paradigm: making the city safe for the middle class." Where the traditional city "demanded engagement," the new paradigm "sanctions disengagement even as it professes to celebrate the virtues of urbanity." Its purest examples are the edge cities (City Post Oak in Houston, Tysons Corner, Buckhead, Las Colinas), and its defining characteristic is "the privatization of the public realm" — the displacement of streets by malls, festival marketplaces, atrium hotel lobbies, and gated communities, so that "entire neighbourhoods become, in effect, one vast piece of private property." The concept is the diagnostic counterpart to New Urbanism, the reform movement (Duany and Plater-Zyberk's Seaside) that Goldberger treats as the best available answer to sprawl, while noting that it can degenerate into "the disingenuous, falsely sweet air of the theme park" and that "you cannot make a valid place only out of yearning or out of trying to market nostalgia."

Key Thinkers

• Paul Goldberger — formulates the paradigm and its defining privatisation of the public realm.
• Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk — Seaside and the New Urbanism codes. (PAGE NEEDED — see log.)
• Jane Jacobs — the dense, mixed, street-centred city the paradigm abandons.

Related Concepts

• new-urbanism — the reform movement that answers the paradigm.
• edge-city — the paradigm's purest built type.
• privatised-public-space — the paradigm's spatial signature.
• suburbanism — the value-system (private space, segregation) generalised to city and suburb alike.
• exopolis — Soja's name for the decentred, edge-dominated metropolis.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• source-notes/goldberger-2009-why-architecture-matters — ch. 7 (pp. 168–73) sets out the new urban paradigm, the privatisation of the public realm, and the New Urbanism alternative.
• source-notes/jacobs-1961-death-and-life-great-american-cities — the traditional city of mixed use and street life the paradigm displaces.

Open Questions

• If the paradigm "sanctions disengagement," is it a genuine urbanism at all — or the suburbanisation of the city under a new name?
• Can New Urbanism's codes and traditional forms generate real community, or only the appearance of it, when the underlying land economics remain those of the edge city?
• Does cyberspace complete the paradigm by removing the need for shared physical place altogether, or create new forms of encounter that Goldberger's account does not yet register?