New Urbanism and Beyond: Designing Cities for the Future

Edited by Tigran Haas

Rizzoli, 2008, 349 pp., $50 hardcover

Sixty-eight architects, planners, academics, consultants, theorists, and others contributed essays to this big, handsome, amply illustrated, book, so to say that the results are “diverse” would be quite an understatement. Practically everything can be found in its 349 pages: basic explanations of New Urbanism, thoughts about where New Urbanism should go, criticisms of the movement’s shortcomings, studies of significant techniques, and more. If I wore a hat, I would enthusiastically tip it to Tigran Haas of the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Haas has assembled one of the most stimulating books yet published about New Urbanism.
It’s impossible to cite all that’s interesting in such a wide-ranging book, but I’ll mention a few of the things I found compelling, starting with an essay by University of Michigan urban historian Robert Fishman. “Reform movements are inevitably molded by the crisis they were created to combat,” Fishman says. For New Urbanists in the 1980s and early 1990s, the crisis that most mattered was the spread of aesthetically degraded, inconveniently configured, civically subpar suburbs. Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, and others therefore aimed to introduce compact, pedestrian-scale, mixed-use development to greenfield sites. They attempted to give regions much better edges.

“What almost no one foresaw was the surprising resurgence of the central cities in the 1990s and beyond,” Fishman observes. “From Brooklyn to Oakland, from South Boston to South Chicago to South Central Los Angeles, districts that seemed beyond saving rebounded to become precisely the walkable, diverse, mixed-use, mixed-income districts that the Charter had called for.” As that happened, New Urbanism’s suburban transformation effort became less exciting than what was being done in the central cities.

“No newly built suburban project can hope to reproduce the social dynamism of these reurbanized neighborhoods,” Fishman observes. “The few genuine examples of ‘reconfigured’ New Urbanist suburbia — whether ‘neotraditional’ in the Duany Plater-Zyberk mold, or ‘Transit-Oriented Development’ (TOD) in the Calthorpe mold — are almost necessarily a compromise: too dense to satisfy those households still craving the American dream house in all its large-lot glory; and yet not dense or diverse enough to match the more authentic urbanism of the reviving urban neighborhoods.”

Moving to the core
The result Fishman sees is that New Urbanism is undergoing a “shift to the urban core” — to the central cities and their first-ring suburbs. He contends that little of the suburban periphery has actually been transformed, despite much-publicized projects like Kentlands, Celebration, and Orenco Station (which had been envisioned by some as the sparkplugs for broad regional changes). Maybe new urbanists don’t need to focus a great deal of attention on the outer edges, Fishman suggests, because real estate analysts are now predicting that growth there is going to slow down anyway.  

The most promising future he sees is in Re-Urbanism — in the improvement and revival of areas in or near the metropolitan center, areas that tend to have the scale, the transportation systems, the mix of uses, and other ingredients essential for truly vibrant urban life. New urbanists, who have generally been promoters of density in a density-resistant nation, will have to become alert to the danger of overcrowding. A vital role of New Urbanism, he observes, will be to act as “an advocate not simply for density but for the right kind of density.”

Fishman’s essay in some ways complements “The Unbearable Lightness of New Urbanism” — a provocative piece by Emily Talen that criticizes New Urbanism for failing to deliver sufficiently on its social agenda. Talen, a planning professor at Arizona State University, argues that New Urbanism is due to enter a new phase. “During the first two decades issues like street calming, parking lot location, retail mix, and the optimal dimensions of sidewalks, streets, and blocks dominated internal discourse,” she says. That may have been necessary, she says, in “a country that had lost its ability to build good places.”
But now, Talen asserts, New Urbanism is “forced to consider the deeper implications of its existence. …

If a movement becomes overconcerned with design achievements and underconcerned with social effect, it becomes a cliché of planning failure.” As Talen sees it, New Urbanism has to serve much more than the upper middle class, the segment of society that until now has been the most receptive audience. Neighborhoods must achieve a broader socioeconomic mix. Affordability must receive higher priority. There will have to be day care and other services that poorer families can afford, in economically diverse neighborhoods. Prescriptions like these are not what wealthier people are currently eager to embrace, but if New Urbanism is committed to social equity — as the Charter suggests — this is the direction in which Talen thinks it will have to move.

In an opening essay, the eminent design thinker Christopher Alexander argues that although places designed by new urbanists are better than conventional developments, they “still make only very small improvements to the human condition.” Alexander writes: “The products of the new form-based codes have so far still been primarily stylistic. Although they also contain certain practical benefits for living, they are fundamentally making changes only in the appearance, not in the underlying substance or social-spatial fabric, of the communities they create.”  

Alexander defines a good place to live as one that offers “the experience of inner psychological freedom, … the possibility of unconstrained activity and interaction, emotionally satisfying work, an atmosphere of enjoyment, and the invitation to be alive.” This, he says, “does not come from the style of the buildings,” nor can it come from corporations relying on “the machinery and the monetary and control structures of the modern developer.” Like some of the other writers in this book, Alexander has ideas that sometimes intersect with New Urbanism but that at other times go far beyond them or even against them.

All of this makes for provocative, lively, and challenging reading. The majority of the writers are instructive or enlightening, and a few are inspirational. Jan Gehl, the Danish urban designer, manages to be all three in his essay on public spaces. He points out that unlike the inhabitants of earlier centuries, modern people have many choices of how and where to spend their time, which makes public activities more “optional” than they used to be. He assures readers, however, that if the quality is high, if public spaces are “well placed, well designed, and inviting,” the people will come.

Haas has gathered writings from what amounts to a who’s-who of architecture, planning, urban design, and related fields. Contributions have been collected from Leon Krier, Peter Hall, William McDonough, Daniel Solomon, Dolores Hayden, Allan Jacobs, Robert Gibbs, Christopher Leinberger, Douglas Kelbaugh, James Howard Kunstler, William Mitchell, Joel Garreau, Robert Putnam, Ray Oldenburg, Richard Florida, and more than 50 others — including, of course, the path-breakers Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and Calthorpe. This is a book that every new urbanist should have.