New Urbanism

Definition

New Urbanism is the American reform movement in planning and design — crystallized in the 1980s, institutionalized as the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU, founded 1993, ~20,000 members) — that models new communities on the prewar, mixed-use, pedestrian-oriented small town. Wentling's practitioner genealogy: "One approach suggested modeling new communities after historical small towns, called traditional neighborhood developments or TNDs," advocated by "Duany/Plater-Zyberk Architects in Miami… Looney Ricks Kiss Architects in Memphis… and Calthorpe Associates in San Francisco" (Wentling 2017, p. 46). The movement's founding case is Seaside, Florida (conceived early 1980s, developer Robert Davis, 80 acres) — "hailed as the antidote to sprawl," though "Criticism of Seaside focused on its elitist character as a second home community, and labeled traditionalist planning as another form of social engineering" (p. 48). Its more affordable demonstration is Harbor Town, Memphis (RTKL/Looney Ricks Kiss — "mainstream primary housing for varied household income groups," rear alleys, front porches, pp. 48–49); its transit wing is Calthorpe's transit-oriented development (TOD) — first at Laguna West, where "residents can walk anywhere in the community in 15 min and also have mass-transit access to the greater region" (p. 49). The movement's regulatory instruments — the SmartCode and form-based zoning, "which dictate the size and shape of buildings as opposed to use" (p. 49) — are its translation into law.

In this wiki New Urbanism is Cluster H's reform-movement register: the organized programme through which the suburb's critics sought to reorder it from within — the practical counterpart to the scholarly diagnoses (Cochrane et al.'s reversal, Keil's density myths) and to Dovey's ambivalent finding that New-Urbanist estates manufacture "instant place identity" (neighbourhood-character, place-identity).

The Soja register (2000) — "Simulating the New Urbanism." Soja reads the movement as "a peculiar postmodern combination of historical urban nostalgia and present-day postsuburbia" (p. 248): the British wing built on Prince Charles and Leon Krier "dreamed of recreating pre-industrial cities in postindustrial Europe"; the American fountainhead is Seaside, Florida (Duany & Plater-Zyberk) — a "revival town" of "controlled heterogeneity" later used as the set of The Truman Show. Soja's critique targets the movement's fictional histories: "Such fictional histories are common features of the projects inspired by the New Urbanism" — the Montgomery Village brochure's "Once upon a time, a Dutch family settled…" presented as "hypersimulation" (p. 249). Yet Soja refuses simple dismissal: "it is increasingly capturing the contemporary popular and professional urban imaginaries… it must continue to be critically evaluated to help preserve some of its most positive possibilities, for in many ways the New Urbanism represents a better future for the postmetropolitan built environment than many of its 'default' alternatives" (p. 250). The Playa Vista controversy (the largest single building project in LA history, its New-Urbanist plans, DreamWorks, the wetlands) is the built test case (pp. 249–250). Where the wiki's Wentling register documents the movement from inside its practice, Soja's situates it inside the hyperreal: nostalgia "packaged… and poured into the Outer and Inner Cities of today."

Key Thinkers

• wentling-james — the movement's inside documenter: TND/TOD genealogy, Seaside's media breakthrough and elitism critique, Harbor Town and Laguna West as affordable/transit demonstrations, CNU's institutionalization (2017)
• Andres Duany & Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (not yet paged — see log) — Seaside and the TND codification; later the SmartCode and form-based zoning
• Peter Calthorpe (not yet paged — see log) — TOD and the Pedestrian Pocket; with Sim Van der Ryn, Sustainable Communities (1986)
• Robert Davis (not yet paged — see log) — Seaside's developer whose "commitment to actually build the community… added credibility to the TND model" (p. 47)
• Randall Arendt (not yet paged — see log) — Rural by Design (2015): the conservation-community planning catalogue adjacent to the movement

Related Concepts

• separation-of-uses — the Euclidean doctrine the movement formed against
• missing-middle-housing — the typological programme CNU-adjacent authors advanced from within the movement
• neighbourhood-character — the design-guideline apparatus (pattern books, regulating plans) the movement developed — and the instrument Dovey analyzes as covenant-like control
• place-identity — the manufactured identity critique of the movement's estates
• suburban-governance — the private-street and HOA regime the movement's communities often deploy
• urban-sprawl — the movement's declared enemy ("the antidote to sprawl")
• planetary-suburbanization — the global condition the movement's American remedies only partially address
• towers-in-the-park — the modernist-density counter-image the movement's dense-low fabric replaced

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the TND/TOD genealogy (pp. 46–49); Seaside's design formula and elitism criticism (pp. 47–48); Harbor Town's mixed-income primary housing (p. 48); Laguna West as first TOD and its unfulfilled transit link (p. 49); CNU founding and SmartCode/form-based zoning (p. 49); the ICAA counterweight to modernism (pp. 52–54); "not a trend, but a return to acknowledged community planning goals" (p. 58)
• Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — the critical register: the New-Urbanist estate as "market-led development incorporating a self-conscious creation of place identity" and "instant place identity" (Dovey 2010, p. 67); the covenant's closure of becoming (p. 78)
• Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — the simulation register: "Simulating the New Urbanism" (pp. 248–250); Seaside, the Truman Show set, the Krier transatlantic tie, "controlled heterogeneity"; the Montgomery Village hypersimulation and the fictional-history critique; Playa Vista as the contested flagship; the better-than-default adjudication (p. 250).
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the movement's intellectual ancestor, three decades before Seaside: the four generators of diversity (mixed primary uses, small blocks, aged buildings, dense concentration, pp. 150–151) are the programme the New Urbanists later re-coded as mixed use, connected street grids, and walkable density; the prewar-reform charter ("the return to acknowledged community planning goals… practiced for centuries" in Wentling's phrase) here stated from the planning-theory side — the prewar street neighborhoods and districts whose self-government the movement's TNDs imitate (Ch. 6); and the warning the movement inherited imperfectly: the corner-grocery gimmick ("room had been left here and there at great intervals for a corner grocery store… a thin, patronizing conception of city diversity," pp. 190–191) as the template for NU's inserted retail. The lineage is traceable item by item — Duany's "traditional neighborhood" is Jacobs's street neighborhood; the SmartCode's form-based logic is a codified version of her scale-of-frontage zoning (p. 234); and the movement's anti-sprawl stance inherits her FHA/credit-machinery diagnosis (urban-sprawl, cataclysmic-money). Where the movement's other sources document its practice and simulation, Jacobs supplies its constitution. See mixed-primary-uses, small-blocks, aged-buildings, missing-middle-housing.
• Dark Age Ahead (Jacobs 2004) — the movement's abstraction-problem diagnosis, one register further from its practice: those who welcome "smart growth in the abstract" will not welcome the actual densification it requires ("Those who love their suburbs as they are, and want to pass them on inviolate to posterity, will not welcome the increased densities and additional uses I have postulated, no matter how enthusiastically they hail 'smart growth' in the abstract," p. 151); the NIMBY fairness concession ("Suburbanites suspicious of change should not be dismissed as selfish proponents of NIMBY… They have a point worth heeding: things can be made worse, not better. They often have been, under the banners of good intentions," p. 152); the detail-level criterion ("Whether densification actually can improve suburbs… will not depend on adherence to abstractions like densification and smart growth, but rather on tangible, boring details," p. 152); and the regulatory alternative — performance codes as what would actually reverse sprawl "decently — but not the same rules and regulations that created and encouraged sprawl" (p. 153), a proposal that stands to the movement's form-based SmartCode as an external replacement rather than an internal reform. See densification, performance-codes, separation-of-uses.
• The New London Vernacular (Callister 2026) — the British cousin and the shared reflex: London's "urban renaissance" type (late-1990s/2000s brownfield regeneration, perimeter blocks, mixed use, walkability, "design-led planning," p. 22) as the UK parallel to the New-Urbanist programme — and the shared failure mode Callister documents in it: schemes that "look good in plan and CGI… but many fail at ground level. The commercial units remain empty. The public realm feels over-managed. The brick elevations become monotonous. The courtyards are technically accessible but socially lifeless. The development feels planned, but not lived in" (p. 24). Soja's simulation critique and Callister's CGI/plan critique converge: the rendering as the genre in which the reform movement replaces the city it simulates. See london-urban-types, perimeter-block, city-at-eye-level.
• Why Architecture Matters (Goldberger 2009) — Seaside and the New Urbanism codes as the best available answer to sprawl (pedestrian scale, mixed use, regulated form), with the caution that it can decline 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' (pp. 171–72).

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Wentling ingest; the Jacobs (1961) ingest has supplied the movement's intellectual ancestor; awaits direct sources on Duany/Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe, and the anti-New-Urbanist literature.

Open Questions

• Is New Urbanism a reform (returning to acknowledged prewar practice, per Wentling's "not a trend, but a return" framing, p. 58) or a style (a nostalgic image marketed through fashion, per Dovey's manufactured-identity critique)? The cluster holds both readings.
• Wentling notes traditional planning "does not depend on traditional architecture to be successful" (p. 52) — can the movement's planning principles be detached from its traditionalist aesthetics, or is the "brand" inseparable?
• Seaside was criticized as "another form of social engineering" (p. 48) — how does that charge interact with Røe's finding that the publicly planned suburb's ideology stayed hidden while its layout framed practice? Is the New Urbanist pattern book the private sector's version of the welfare state's planning ideology?