Building the New Urbanism

Places, Professions, and Profits in the American Metropolitan Landscape

Aaron Passell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138108752
• eBook ISBN: 9781136266812
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The New Urbanism is perhaps the most influential movement that has emerged in suburban design, planning, and development in recent decades. It proposes to reform conventional suburban development by "building community." Building the New Urbanism asks "why new urbanism now?" to provide the first in-depth sociological investigation of the emergence of this phenomenon.

This volume situates the growth of New Urbanism in the history of urban and suburban policy and development. The book builds an account of the movement's founding and development, linking its progress to the making of new places. The volume also investigates how the movement capitalized upon dynamics within architecture, planning, and the homebuying public to recruit support from among those groups. The book establishes a framework for analyzing the opportunities and constraints that confront any effort to change the way we produce the built environment. Moreover, it reveals how elaborately social the production of the built environment is and how specific the material solutions to social conditions must be to resolve this process.

Building the New Urbanism is an accessible volume that encapsulates and engages the dominant history of American suburbia. It draws on interviews with key figures, brings the work of prominent theorists of culture and science into the investigation, and broadens the focus of urban studies to the metropolitan region. It will be of particular interest to scholars and students of urban and suburban development, sociology, geography, and planning.

1
Introduction

I grew up in a first-ring, streetcar suburb in an old Northeastern city. For me, the metropolitan built environment always seemed a dense, finely textured place. It integrated the histories, purposes, and buildings of the wide range of people who had once inhabited it and did then. It was a living landscape that combined incremental and catastrophic change with spaces that appeared to be almost static: store fronts became flats; historic buildings got modern facades, then lost them; some neighborhoods were demolished and replaced, while others were just left to age quietly.

The broader city, as I experienced it, was clearly a product of piecemeal negotiation, diverse interests, and wide-ranging, even conflicting, ideals. When I first encountered the New Urbanism, on the other hand, it seemed to be something else altogether. These new neighborhoods contained the density that one might expect in an urban space and familiar – old-fashioned – building types, but the underlying logic, or illogic, was missing. They were uniformly new, carefully organized – consistent – and clearly designed to convey some sort of meaning.

Certainly American cities contained instances of large-scale residential development – urban, subsidized housing projects being the most obvious example – but the New Urbanism’s “traditional” design at scale mitigated the authoritarian impression those spaces gave off, by incorporating a kind of suburban banality. My initial readings on these spaces suggested that their builders maintained a conspicuous idealism that drew on a tradition of planned urban spaces in the United States and elsewhere. In the face of mixed historical evidence, the creators of these places believed they could shape the way people would live, that they could determine in advance, through design, the meaning of these spaces for their inhabitants.

As I began to investigate these new places, it quickly became clear that each was a product of its particular location and the moment in which it emerged. Yet all New Urbanist places shared features in common. Politics, economics, and culture at multiple scales all informed the designs and developments, but so did the individuals and professions involved in creating them. Less conspicuously social factors, like the standardized dimensions of the building materials, contributed to the look and feel of the developments. Then again, the introduction of actual inhabitants to these developments confronted – and, in some cases, swept aside – designers’ intentions with the forces of everyday life. New Urbanist places were simultaneously and profoundly like and unlike other places in their origins and their relationship to the people who used them.

New Urbanism has only proved more popular in the decade since the movement first came to my attention during graduate school. New Urbanist developments are cropping up across the country and becoming increasingly common in the places where they have had the most success – the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, Pacific, and Midwest states. The locations in which these developments seem to flourish are sprawling, de-centered regions, somewhere between suburbs and exurbs, lacking clear geographic focus – the Maryland and Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., and central Florida, for example. The New Urbanist effort to create “community by design” apparently strikes a particular chord in these areas and, while cultural critics object to an observed nostalgia, homebuyers have proven willing to pay a premium to escape conventional suburbia. As the total number of neighborhood-scale, New Urbanist developments across the United States approaches 1,000, we are forced to ask, “Why New Urbanism now?”

From a sociological perspective, the sheer hubris involved in “building community” is striking. New Urbanist designers are applying an understanding of the relationship between the built environment and social life that urban sociologists – along with urban historians, environmental psychologists, and others – still vigorously debate. If the movement were simply a forum for aesthetic or cultural reform, this certainty would be one thing, but it is more conspicuous when paired with concrete interventions in the suburban landscape.

The founders of the New Urbanism were galvanized to respond to the common form of American suburban development – incoherent metropolitan sprawl – by their observation of its inhumanity and increasing ubiquity. They see an American landscape dominated by the automobile, the result of both intended and unintended consequences of Euclidean zoning – the strict segregation of urban functions and their typical forms – and federal highway policy since World War Two. In response, the New Urbanists propose a comprehensive reintegration of the various functions of urban neighborhoods and pre-automobile small towns. While they acknowledge the impossibility of simply reproducing those traditional American small towns in the suburban now, they nevertheless attempt to reintroduce certain characteristics we have come to associate with urbanity and previous eras into the spatial relationships of suburban design, particularly walkability and a sense of community. They study the urban places they like best, that perform well according to their criteria, places like Savannah, Georgia; Charleston, South Carolina; Alexandria, Virginia; and Beacon Hill, Boston. Then they represent the relations they identify as responsible for these places’ success in graphic, as opposed to verbal, “codes” at two scales – the urban or neighborhood and the architectural or design.

The intended effect of the combined urban and architectural codes is to produce a place that people want to use intensively and on foot. Some basic household needs – groceries, dry cleaning, video rental – should be accessible within a five- to ten-minute walk from any home in the neighborhood, as should schools, playgrounds, and ideally public transportation. Residents should enjoy these walks because of the appealingly proportioned “outdoor rooms” formed by the street, the sidewalk, and the exteriors of homes. Pedestrians should also appreciate the variety in design detail, the casual contact with neighbors encouraged by front porches and density, and the sense of “eyes on the street” (Jacobs 1961)¹ that adequate window area and the proximity of houses can suggest.

Yet this neo-traditional turn is selective in its attention to “walkability” and proximity: there is not yet a New Urbanist effort to do away with garages, just to move them, and no one in the movement seems to question the American middle-class homebuyer’s apparent need for more than 2,000 square feet of living space. Moreover, the nostalgia embedded in the design of some of these places opens the New Urbanism to exploitation by non-New Urbanist developers who make superficial reference to their designs, capitalizing on nostalgia without incorporating New Urbanist spatial relations.

There are two primary New Urbanist project types: urban infill – intensifying and reconfiguring existing neighborhoods, ranging from HOPE VI redevelopment of federally subsidized housing projects to luxurious city homes; and suburban new towns – so-called greenfield development of an entirely new place, usually an expensive one. The HOPE VI program and its connection to the New Urbanist movement will be considered in Chapter 5, but this research is primarily focused on large-scale, new developments, because of their distinctness from their suburban surroundings and their consistency at significant scale.

By the end of 2004, at least 760 neighborhood-scale or larger projects were under construction or completed in at least forty-four states, housing as many as 12,000 people in a single project (New Urban News 2003; Steuteville 2005).² The growth rate since then has been such that the movement’s primary press organ, the New Urban News, has been overwhelmed in its efforts to track projects and is developing a new tracking methodology. Economic analyses of New Urban new-towns have shown that homebuyers will pay as much as a 12–16 per cent premium over prices for comparable properties nearby, despite smaller lots (Song and Knaap 2003; Tu and Eppli 2001, 1999).

At the same time that it has become a fact on the ground, New Urbanism has asserted itself both as a collective and in the professions related to it – primarily architecture, planning, and development. The international Congress for the New Urbanism boasts “over 3,100 members in 20 countries and 49 states,”³ and lists twelve state chapters, five “Chapter Organizing Committees,” six “Interest Groups,” student organizations,⁴ and the affiliated Next Generation of New Urbanists. Major figures in the movement have assumed important positions at schools of architecture throughout the country,⁵ while New Urbanist planning and design firms grow, proliferate, and win prestigious design prizes. The American Planning Association dedicated a “track” – one of six – entitled “The New Urbanism Comes of Age” to the movement’s progress at its 2005 national conference in San Francisco – four full days of instructive workshops and reflexive panels. The Urban Land Institute, the professional organization for developers, publishes numerous how-to texts on New Urbanism as well as research on the movement and its products in their journal, Urban Land. “New Urbanism” means simultaneously and essentially an organized reform movement and the places that it has produced.

The New Urbanism in three takes

I have spent time in three developments that capture various aspects of the New Urbanism in particular ways. Seaside, Florida, is the first, proto-New Urbanist development – the movement would not get its name until several years after Seaside’s completion. It established a key New Urbanist design firm, DPZ, and the key practices of the New Urbanist design process. Celebration, Florida, is a neo-traditional development outside of Orlando built by the Disney Corporation. It was neither designed by “card-carrying” New Urbanists, nor to New Urbanist standards, but it got so much publicity and is so frequently confused with early New Urbanist efforts that it deserves attention. The Kentlands, in Gaithersburg, Maryland, is, in some sense, the first fully realized New Urbanist, neighborhood-scale development and embodies many of the successes and shortcomings of the projects that followed it.

Seaside, Florida

As I arrived and struggled to park my large, American rental car – frustrated by signs for “Visitor Parking” that led nowhere and a great deal of curbside clearly marked “no parking” – I encountered the following sign:

PEDESTRIANS ONLY

No vehicles except

OWNERS and their GUESTS

This sign was posted beside a street where Seaside proper abuts an older development called Seagrove. It captures a number of elements of Seaside: first, streets are for people, not cars. The exception is the “owners” of the predominantly second homes in Seaside coming and going from and to their first homes elsewhere. In my few days in Seaside, I saw many people walking between home and the beach, particularly at midday and the end of the afternoon, but golf carts were also ubiquitous. Seaside was clearly not a “town,” as such, but rather a resort, structured in walkable relation to its focus and key public space, the sugar-white strip of sand along the Gulf of Mexico.

The second thing I noticed was the emphasis on ownership. Seaside is exclusive and expensive, beautiful and charming, but not welcoming to outsiders, at least not outside its commercial core. In this sense, it is a New Urbanist success, because its property values arise from its planning and design – as well as its location – which also seem to foster a territoriality that arises from sense of place. When I visited in 2002, housing prices started at $800,000 (Dunlop 2001). In post-recession 2010, zillow.com lists few properties with asking prices below $1 million and a number closer to $5 million (July 22, 2010). Seaside is wealthy and overwhelmingly white: just about any kind of population integration that we might associate with urbanity is impossible at those prices.

The development is tiny: approximately 350 lots, mostly single-family houses, on eighty acres –approximately twelve New York City blocks or eight in Chicago – with a densely interconnected grid of streets, all of which lead either to the central square and commercial core or across the two-lane County Road 30-A to the beach. Porches and white picket fences are mandatory in the architectural code and the setbacks from the street – where houses are placed on the lot – are minimal. The resulting effect is that you always feel close to those inside when you walk, even though the boundary between public and private space is clearly marked. Narrow sand paths, for foot traffic only, cut through the middle of blocks.

The architectural code for the development specifies a great deal about the houses and lots: the appropriate landscaping and foliage; the pitch, symmetricality, and material of the roof; the kind of wood to be used in siding; that “Individual fence patterns shall not replicate another on the same street” (Mohney and Easterling 1991: 261). The code mandates the proportion and styles of doors, the proportions and styles of windows, and driveway surfaces. Nevertheless, the code does not specify exactly what the houses should look like, and each seems slightly different from the next.

But even if Seaside is a second-home, resort community that excludes many of the functions and people we identify with urbanity, it is a lovely place. Begun in the early 1980s, it is the first concrete product of proto-New Urbanist design principles. It is located well west on the Florida Panhandle, a stretch of coast once referred to as the “Redneck Riviera” but now marketed as Florida’s “Emerald Coast.” It is closer to Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi than most of the population centers in Florida, and, anecdotally – counting license plates of cars parked by houses on a July afternoon – draws on those states for most of its homeowners and visitors.

It was designed by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism, for developer Robert Davis, after a now legendary tour of the Southeast that identified the key elements of the local vernacular and the underlying spatial relations of Southern, small-town urbanism. The next step was a charrette – an intensive, interdisciplinary, iterative, problem-solving, design session over multiple days that incorporated as many pertinent professionals and local stakeholders as possible. The Seaside charrette produced both the urban code, determining the layout of the development and the arrangement of various uses in relation to one another, and the architectural code, mentioned above, specifying building design in the interest of its performance in shaping and inflecting space.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk were early in their careers at the time, having recently left Miami firm Arquitectonica to found DPZ in 1980. Both had received undergraduate degrees in architecture from Princeton, then proceeded to Yale’s architecture program for Masters degrees, where they had worked with, among many others, Vincent Scully, prominent architectural historian and scholar of American urbanism. The social network they developed over the course of their education would constitute much of the foundation of the future movement. The couple’s design for Seaside would launch the collective effort to derive and analyze desirable urban qualities and build them into new places, in response to the concurrent depredations of suburban sprawl. Davis, the developer, became a partner in the Arcadia Land Company and has since built a number of New Urbanist projects.

Celebration, Florida

While my immediate and instinctive response to Seaside combined envy with outrage at conspicuous privilege, my initial reaction to Celebration was something closer to fear of the dark. On a muggy Wednesday evening in late July, this early exemplar of neo-traditional planning and design felt more like a neo-ghost town. In an hour-and-a-half of walking neighborhood streets, I encountered only three people: a woman walking a dog, clearly made nervous by my presence; a female jogger who overtook me from behind so noiselessly as to make me jump; and a teenage boy glimpsed as he crossed a street-lit intersection far ahead, no longer visible by the time I reached it. The streetlights, widely spaced and alternating between sides of the street, left portions of the sidewalks dark, punctuated by a brightness disconcerting in its contrast to the rest of the street. Hundreds of little anoles, the ever-present, central Florida lizard, scampered around my feet as they moved from the street-side grassy strip to the front lawns on the other side of the sidewalk.

On paper, Celebration is organized around a vibrant commercial core. From my visit, however, the design of the neighborhoods raises more interesting issues. The walkability – and the community nominally generated by it – associated with neo-traditional design is often moot in the central Florida climate. When I visited in July, it was still hot at 9:00pm and the air felt like you could swim through it. Most reasonable people were indoors and even the peeps of countless tree frogs couldn’t drown out the powerful hum of the ubiquitous cooling systems. All of the houses were closed up tight and no cheerful evening sounds – conversation or even television – made their way as far as the sidewalk. Needless to say, by mid-afternoon the next day, the atmosphere was stifling.

In contrast to Seaside, where each house was individually commissioned in accord with the architectural code, in Celebration houses must be built in one of six styles: Coastal, Classical, Colonial Revival, French Normandy, Mediterranean, or Victorian – which combination of styles has never occurred organically in any one place. Each style is carefully described in the Celebration Pattern Book, a neo-traditional reinvention of an historical builders’ reference. Only two builders were responsible for all of the project’s early residences (Frantz and Collins 1999: 80–1). This combination generates a kind of uniform, historical cuteness executed in modern materials.

But like Seaside, house styles must vary within a block – no house can be the same style as the one on either side of it. House colors are selected from a limited palette associated with their respective style, and may not be the same color as any other within three houses in either direction, except if the color is white (ibid.: 65–6). The result is a Disney-ish reproduction of a pre-World War Two, small-town neighborhood that never existed, at quite a large scale – approximately 9,000 residents in eight distinct neighborhoods as of 2008, projected to reach 20,000 at build ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Before the New Urbanism
• 3 Making a movement
• 4 Reimagining the suburbs, beginning to build
• 5 Surviving its critics and reinforcing its position
• 6 Making New Urbanist places
• 7 Conclusion: the built environment is a social process
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index