Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition

A book edited by Emily Talen; McGraw-Hill, 302 pages, $60 softcover

The Charter of the New Urbanism is the most enduring statement of land-use planning and design principles of recent decades, at least.

It’s been 17 years since the Charter was signed in Charleston, South Carolina, and 14 years since the first book based on the Charter was published. As Andres Duany recently noted, “You are not a new urbanist if you don't believe in the Charter. And by the way, you are a very weird person if you read the Charter and say ‘I don't agree with this.’ That's the nature of the document. It really screws with your head.”

Other planners and developers may design or build according to fashion, or the prevailing winds of public opinion, or merely for the fee. To a point, new urbanists do the same. But if you hire a new urbanist, the Charter will always anchor their design at the regional, neighborhood, and block/building scales. And the Charter has helped to shape the built environment.

The brief statement consisting of a preamble and 27 principles — a total of 1,103 words — has helped to spawn form-based codes, the Transect, complete streets, the proliferation of true transit-oriented development (not just transit-adjacent development), the trend of new mixed-use urban centers, and more.

“We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy,” reads the second paragraph of the preamble. That has become the mainstream goal of planning and urban design reform in the last two decades. 

Now Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition has been published. The editor is Emily Talen of Arizona State University in Phoenix, a city that needs work based on the Charter more than most places. (Luckily, transit-oriented projects based on Charter principles are being planned along the city’s new 20-mile light rail line).

Why the Second Edition is needed

The first Charter Book was published 1999, when the world was a different place. Few were thinking about climate change — that subject is never mentioned in the first edition. In this second edition, it is front and center. “Suburban sprawl is nothing less than the principal cause of climate change,” writes planner/architect Duany, one of the Charter’s original authors.

The term form-based code was not yet invented in the 1990s, and now more than 300 municipalities have adopted them. There was little or no study, at the time, of the connection between the design of communities and health outcomes. That subject has been a major course of study over the last 10 years. The terms “sprawl repair” and “suburban retrofit” had yet to be coined, although the ideas were being developed in various projects.

The real estate markets in the 1990s were far different. Suburban sprawl was exploding; we were a decade away from the housing crash. New urbanists’ infill projects focused on public housing and downtown plans, but new towns in the suburbs were getting most of the media attention for New Urbanism. The Millennials, the new generation that is now the biggest market for downtown revitalization, were mostly still in grade school — largely in the distant suburbs.

Yet much has stayed the same. “In fast-growing suburban areas, communities continue to try controlling immense new developments with zoning and subdivision codes that were probably enacted in the 1950s to shape smaller projects,” writes Jonathan Barnett in his Second Edition essay.

Some cities are doing well, but others continue to struggle because “the increasing popularity of older urban neighborhoods is still not enough to offset lost jobs from vanishing industries, the growing need for social services, problems with the school system, and dysfunctional housing projects,” Barnett says. The suburbs themselves are changing — inner-ring suburbs in particular are starting to experience many of the social problems that were previously found in the nearby city. “What continues to be new about the New Urbanism is the assumption that solutions to these problems require that they be all worked out together,” he concludes.

The cover of the new Charter Book is has turned from red to green — appropriate given how ecological ideas have permeated New Urbanism, and new urban ideas have taken hold among some environmentalists. The book is filled with many more, and better, images. They accompany dozens of new essays.

The text largely focuses on practical strategies rather than theory. “Some superb know-how has been rescued from the dustier shelves of libraries, but the real achievement [of the New Urbanism] has been the creativity applied to encountered situations,” Duany notes. These include, he says, the precise market studies of Zimmerman/Volk Associates, the surrogate governing protocols of Daniel Slone and Doris Goldstein, the clever retail hybrids of Robert Gibbs and Seth Harry, and the manual on thoroughfare design by the Institute of Transportation Engineers and the Congress for the New Urbanism.

New urbanists have been accused, Duany says, “of being impossible to debate because we instantly assimilate all good ideas. And why not?” he asks.

That seems an apt statement of purpose for the Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition.

Robert Steuteville is editor and publisher of Better! Cities & Towns. His commentary piece, Market Support, is included on page 114 of the Charter of the New Urbanism, Second Edition. This article appears in the August 2013 print issue. Subscribe and get all of the articles delivered.