Craving Community: The New American Dream

By Todd W. Mansfield, Ross P. Yockey, and L. Beth Yockey

Abecedary Press, 2007, 292 pp., $24.95 hardcover.

It’s troubling when the chairman of the Urban Land Institute — Todd Mansfield, who for several years was president of the Disney subsidiary that built Celebration, Florida — turns out a book that may muddy rather than clarify popular understanding of New Urbanism.

To be sure, Craving Community, which Mansfield produced with the help of writer-researchers Ross Yockey and Beth Yockey, is largely favorable to New Urbanism’s mission. “From ocean to ocean, Americans are rejecting the isolation of the suburban century and rediscovering the pleasures of connectivity,” Mansfield declares. Dissatisfied with automobile-dependent development, people increasingly want “permanent places,” he says— places  “designed to foster community.”

Mansfield, who is also CEO of the Charlotte, North Carolina-based development firm Crosland LLC, notes that “a significant number of real estate development and urban planning professionals are responding” to the demand for walkable, tighter-knit communities. They are creating developments where appealing sidewalks and the presence of shops and gathering places within walking distance of homes make it easier for people to know their neighbors.

In chronicling mass postwar suburbanization and the subsequent reaction against it, Mansfield says that humans historically tended to gather in small, intimate communities — from Çatalhoyuk, a village founded 9,000 years ago along the Carsamba River in what is now Turkey, to villages like Minchinhampton and Stow-on-the-Wold in the Cotswold region of England. Inspired by these and other ancient villages, he introduces the term “New Villages” as a label for recent US communities that emphasize sociability and community bonds.

It’s an unfortunate term — more a marketing slogan than a serious way of characterizing the attempts that have been made to produce human-scale development during the past 25 years. Many of the New Villages that Mansfield cites cover hundreds of acres; they’re too big and too embedded in a larger metropolis to be legitimately called villages. The criteria are vague. Mansfield applies the “New Villages” tag to some Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs) but also to a number of more conventional projects.

Mansfield’s tossing of TNDs such as Kentlands into the same pot with other sorts of master-planned developments reminds me of how, when New Urbanism was just getting established in the 1990s, sprawl developers often added token elements such as front porches to their standard products — and then tried to pass the projects off as intensely neighborly, old-fashioned places. Such blurring of distinctions makes it harder for ordinary Americans to understand community design.

I was surprised that Mansfield rejects the phrase “Traditional Neighborhood Development.” He writes: “The TND handle was meant to recall pre-World War II inner-ring city development, but it is misleading and possibly off-putting because, for most homebuyers, ‘traditional’ is the kind of neighborhood they grew up with: the typical suburban neighborhood of Sprawlville.” Granted, not everyone immediately understands what “TND” means. But many new urbanist developers make a concerted effort to explain “traditional neighborhood” and how it differs from a conventional subdivision. Rather than confusing people, more often the phrase “Traditional Neighborhood Development” enlightens those who are willing to expend a little effort to learn about community design.

Toward the end of the book, Mansfield argues against urban growth boundaries, asserting that in the Seattle area, the boundary has driven up housing prices, forcing working people to move farther out in search of houses they can afford — thus exacerbating traffic congestion. This is a position worth exploring, but Craving Community tells only one side of the story.

Almost every time I encountered something promising in this book, I soon ran into an error or a dubious interpretation. These ranged from the authors’ claim that houses in TNDs cannot come all the way up to the sidewalks (untrue), to  the assertion that Californians expect “wide open spaces” (tiny lots are in fact common in California subdivisions), to an identification of author James Howard Kunstler as “Robert Kunstler.” My hunch is that Mansfield gave his two collaborators too much of the responsibility for assembling this book. If he had written the book entirely on his own, the writing might have been less sprightly, but the content would no doubt have been better grounded, more judicious, and more persuasive.