The Return of the Town

New Urbanism Offering an Alternative to Suburban Sprawl

by Richard Daub

Sprawl—it's been a dirty word in the planning community for decades, yet very little has been done to contain it. 
      When developer William Levitt started mass producing affordable single-family homes on Long Island farmland after World War II, the concept of town living began a steady decline. By then the automobile was now a mainstay of American life, so it was no longer necessary to live near the stores and restaurants on Main Street. Cities began to expand and engulf the open land that surrounded them, and the American dream evolved into a single-family home in the suburbs with garage and fenced-in backyard. 
      Developers have been highly accommodating to this dream throughout the decades and are likely to remain so as long as profit margins remain high. Without proper planning, however, suburban sprawl has grown out of control in many metropolitan areas. 
      "Unlike the traditional neighborhood, sprawl is not healthy growth," writes Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, in their book Suburban Nation, published in 2000 by North Point Press. "It is essentially self-destructive. Even at relatively low population densities, sprawl tends not to pay for itself financially and consumes land at an alarming rate, while producing insurmountable traffic problems and exacerbating social inequity and isolation."  
      Some had to travel a little farther to find their dream and started moving to the more affordable 'exurbs,' short for 'extra-urban.' 
      Exurbs are rural areas beyond the suburbs where housing developments have been built near high-speed roads that connect them to major metropolitan areas. It is now commonplace for people to drive an hour or more each way to get to work, a task that is becoming less and less affordable with gas prices on the rise. Exurban communities, which experienced massive growth in the 1990s, tend to increase dependency on cars since there are usually no shopping centers within walking distance and too little population density to justify building an expensive public transportation system. 
      According to one adaptation of an old joke, if aliens unfamiliar with planet Earth were to observe an exurban neighborhood on a typical weekday, they might think that the cars were the actual residents because that's all they would see pulling in and out of the garages of the houses. 

New Urbanism

Some developers have realized that suburban and exurban growth cannot continue unabated. There is only so much land, and there and can be only so much demand for communities where residents are forced to drive two or three hours each way to and from work just to live in a nice house where they hardly get to spend any time. 
      In the early 1980s, a movement began on the coast of the Florida panhandle that came to be known as 'new urbanism.' The town of Seaside, where the 1998 movie The Truman Show was filmed, was built under the principles of an era gone by: high-density, pedestrian-friendly towns built around a town center.  
      Houses in new urban communities are generally built smaller than those in the suburbs and are often interspersed with apartment buildings and condos. The town center is located within walking distance of the entire community and usually includes amenities such as banks, restaurants, coffee shops, beauty salons, and even full-sized supermarkets, which do not appear so large without the context of the high volume, multi-purpose shopping center. The streets are narrow in order to discourage driving, and there are no busy highways or expansive parking lots to cross, which helps encourage walking. 
      "People like the idea that they can walk to the corner store to get some milk or pick up the paper, and that they're not necessarily condemned to using the car for short trips," says Christian Leo, a community development planner for the city of Albany, N.Y. "That's even more important with today's gas prices." 
      Walking also promotes interaction with neighbors, as do public areas such as town squares and small parks with benches sprinkled throughout the community. 
      "Through the architecture and design of these projects, it really facilitates more social interaction," Leo says. "I think it just basically builds stronger neighborhoods and creates a bigger sense of community." 
      The end result is a smaller, friendlier town similar to old city neighborhoods except that they aren't as crowded, allowing residents some breathing room. 
      Since new urban communities do not require as much land as sprawling suburban neighborhoods, they can often be built as infill projects that are much closer to city centers. This cuts down on commuting distances, thus reducing fuel consumption and air pollution. Easy access to mass transportation is another common feature of new urban developments that lessens dependency on automobiles. 

New Urbanism Criticism

One of the main criticisms of new urbanism is that, because housing prices in these communities are usually left to the open real estate market, buyers are restricted to certain socio-economic levels. 
      "This is new housing, and it does have luxury items," Leo says. "It's really not housing that's affordable for everybody." 
      Developers have found new urban communities particularly attractive to professionals still in the prime of their careers or those wealthy enough to have retired early. With this demographic having become the primary target market, many whom might find the concept appealing are priced out, causing neighborhoods to lack diversity. Among those often excluded are young people just beginning their careers who have not yet started families and empty-nester retirees looking to downsize but who have found that their older, bigger houses in the suburbs are worth less than newer, smaller new urban homes. 

The Prince of Planning

If Prince Charles wasn't born with the title 'Prince of Wales,' he may very well have pursued a career in urban planning. 
      In 1993, he broke ground on what became the new urban town of Poundbury in southern England. His intent was to help preserve open spaces, farmland, and energy, while creating a socially diverse community that recalls the charm of village life in the era before automobiles. He had been moved by his studies of the failure of regeneration efforts in British towns after they had been heavily bombed during World War II and were rebuilt with utilitarian architecture that created social isolation and removed the feeling of community. 
      "I sought at Poundbury to create an example of a mixed-use, pedestrian-orientated community that reflected local character and local tradition," the Prince said during his acceptance speech for the National Building Museum's Vincent Scully Prize, which he was awarded in November 2005 in Washington D.C. "The obvious starting point was to analyze the successful places and buildings that people have enjoyed living in for centuries, and to draw out the lessons of why they were still so popular today. 
      "Its lessons are simple: a network of legible, interconnected streets that accommodate the car while celebrating the pedestrian; the centrality of the walkable neighborhood as a building block, accommodating work, play, shopping and living in a harmonious way; the 'pepper-potting' of affordable housing and market rate housing; and, finally, the reliance on traditional urbanism, local vernacular architecture and natural materials to restore a sense of harmony, proportion and, above all, something called 'beauty' to day-to-day life." §

Published in The Erickson Tribune, May 2007