Hot topic: the New Urbanism

This Congress for the New Urbanism and the movement in general have been getting a lot of media attention, both positive and negative. The good news is that CNU issues — building real neighborhoods and livable streets, promoting compact regional growth and questioning status quo development practices — are definitely on the radar of the mainstream media. The bad news is that detractors tend to paint New Urbanism as a matter of style, not substance. Here’s a sampling of quotes: “The New Urbanism movement [is] a reasonable, intelligent alternative to the gross urban sprawl we now call home. At its core, New Urbanism advocates building communities for people rather than cars. Although not nirvana, neotraditional planning offers such an improvement over our isolated, economically stratified, uninspired urban areas.” —Los Angeles Times, August 9, 1998 “A group of architects and planners who have named themselves the Congress for the New Urbanism have vowed to halt the spread of faceless, car-centered suburbs by promoting friendly, people-centered towns with corner stores and public greens. And ... they want to preserve old towns and cities through ’infill,’ building on unused urban lots .... New urbanists are no longer the radical fringe but conventional wisdom.” —New York Times, August 1, 1998 “What’s upsetting” about New Urbanism, said Mr. Frampton, “is that the imagery is so retrograde.” —New York Times, August 1, 1998 “If I take exception to New Urbanism, it’s for a failure of social ecology .... Dull as the suburbs but lacking their vivid underlying pathology, New Urbanism is becoming the acceptable face of sprawl.” —Michael Sorkin, Metropolis, August/September 1998 “For a small but growing number of architects, developers and planners, the key to the future can be found in the past .... Proponents of this idea call themselves ‘New Urbanists.’ New Urbanists say Americans used to know how to build communities that work, and they can do it again.” —Nightline, ABC News, July 31, 1998 “I grew up in a city, and in close quarters ... and the feeling that I get here of hearing kids run and play and laugh are the same memories that I have of growing up in that environment. So for me, it’s just like coming home.” —Resident of Kentlands, Maryland, Nightline, ABC News, July 31, 1998 “Ideas only aired in planning seminars and planning and architectural magazines have turned into “For Sale” signs posted in front of New Urbani[st] homes .... It’s appealing to enough ordinary Americans that it is the talk of the development industry.” —The Sunday Oregonian, August 2, 1998 “Sprawl has emerged as a national issue. By subsidizing roads, sewers, water plants and utilities, through tax laws and through environmental regulation, the federal government may be unknowingly nudging development farther and farther into the countryside. The federal government has been both the culprit and the sugar daddy in this drama. The carrot of federal funding continues to push us in directions that produce congestion, pollution, inefficiencies and ultimately decline of cities.” —The Denver Post, August, 5, 1998 “The new frontier for builders and developers lies more in the existing cities and suburbs than on raw land at the edge ... [i]mproving on sprawl is more than a matter of how to do better subdivisions at the margin. It’s how to get better function out of what’s already been done. In a lot of ways, it’s how to deal with everything that has been built since World War II.” —Builder, Special “Sprawl” Issue, July, 1998