Daily Links
July 1st, 2009-
Well, to begin with, New Urbanists are attacked from both sides of America's cultural divide. Chances are, if you mention New Urbanism to group of forward thinking, contemporary design professionals, whether architects or planners, they will roll their eyes. To them New Urbanism…is a facilitator of sprawl, not a solution. Then, because many of these towns and developments feature traditional architecture, New Urbanism is hopelessly nostalgic.
But if you find yourself among a group of conservatives or libertarians, you'll just as likely unleash a denunciation on the grounds that New Urbanism aims to thwart the natural desire of Americans to live in a single-family house on a cul-de-sac.
So how do New Urbanists react to these attacks from the left and the right? I'd like to be able to say that they smile, realizing that to be attacked from both sides is a compliment, and reflects the success of the ideas in their Charter. But that's not always the case.
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What struck me about her talk is that it seems that over a century or so of thinking about it, theories were created for all kinds of urbanism except for the kind that became dominant in America: suburban sprawl. There were the new town planners like Ebenezer Howard (the "Garden City"), the City Beautiful movement with its grand boulevards, the celebrators of diverse cities as they were (Jane Addams, Jane Jacobs), regionalists like Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford, all of whom Prof. Talen says are sources for New Urbanism, and finally the Modernists with their towers in the park.
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I don't think so. New Urbanism is an elastic concept, and an elastic movement. On one hand it's pragmatic, on the other, it's got a Charter with principles. As Mr. Duany says, it's both top-down, because of the Charter, and bottom-up, because in practice New Urbanists designers and planners use local workshops, called charrettes, to listen to what the locals have to say about their lives and conditions.
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For nearly a decade, however, Douglas Kelbaugh, an intrepid professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, has proposed that there are in fact three schools of urbanism currently viable, and many others have accepted Prof. Kelbaugh's terminology at least for discussion purposes. Two of the urbanisms have accepted names: New Urbanism and Everyday Urbanism. The third has a name of Prof. Kelbaugh's devising: Post Urbanism.
July 3rd, 2009 at 7:23 am
Interesting series of columns. My main point of contention is with his note about Douglas Kelbaugh – Kelbaugh isn’t just a professor, he’s the past Dean of the whole College. He was Dean for about 10 years, if I recall correctly. (Maybe I’m testy since he was Dean when I was at U of M).
The complaint about greenfield, neo-traditional development was one my biggest problems with New Urbanism when I first learned about it. I think that the Congress for New Urbanism has really tried to work on that, but they have an up-hill battle because of their original image.