Recommended reading

The authors of two bibliographies of scholarly research on new urbanist topics share a few highlights from the lists. “Factors influencing light-rail station boardings in the United States,” by Michael Kuby et al. in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, March 2004. This article uses a vast set of data to characterize neighborhoods that generate high levels of light-rail ridership, concluding that light rail is feasible not just in big-city central business districts but also in polycentric metropolitan areas that concentrate residences, jobs, or large attractions. “It could be used by new urbanists to convince critics that higher densities are practical and desirable around rail stations,” says University of Georgia academic librarian Lucy Rowland. “An empirical examination of traditional neighborhood development,” by C.C. Tu and Mark Eppli, Real Estate Economics, 2001. Tu and Eppli compared conventional housing markets with three local TNDs and found that there was a significant increase in house prices in the TNDs, “ reports Rowland. “This would be a good study to use in obtaining financing or convincing a municipality that smaller lots wouldn’t decrease the surrounding property values.” Two articles from the Spring 2003 issue of Markets & Morality: “To what extent and in what ways should governmental bodies regulate urban planning” by Charles Bohl and “Civic Art and the City of God: Traditional Urban Design and Christian Evangelism,” by Philip Bess. Bohl’s essay functions as both a concise and eloquent definition of New Urbanism and a spirited defense against critics who say it defies free-market preferences and results in unaffordable enclaves among other transgressions. Bess argues that since good cities are essential to the “good life” and that urbanism has a privileged place in the Christian imagination, Christian churches “compromise both the substance and effectiveness of their evangelical efforts” by tolerating sprawl. Says Emily Talen, of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, “Articles like these that build theory about urban places could be useful, not necessarily to the practitioner, but to building the movement in the long term.”