Introduction

There can be little debate that the New Urbanism has become a force in American planning. What can the movement offer rural communities in Upstate New York and Pennsylvania? And how might a municipality think about utilizing the positive aspects of the New Urbanism? This entry seeks to answer these questions by providing a brief overview of the movement, its history and origins, it's principle design components, and outline the movement's potential strengths and weaknesses.

Movement Overview:

Based on pre-World War II development patterns, New Urbanism seeks to reintegrate housing, workplace, transportation, shopping, and recreation into compact, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use neighborhoods. Developments are ideally linked by transit and set in a regional open-space framework. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) is a "nonprofit organization to advocate for the principles of New Urbanism and for a wholesale shift in the way communities are built" (CNU 2002).

The movement owes its formal roots to the City Beautiful and the Garden City movements of the late 19th century (Fulton 1996). From the City Beautiful, a urban beautification movement borne from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, the CNU adopts an emphasis on monuments, civic architecture, plazas, landscaped parks and public spaces, and the physical ordering of these elements through the use of axes, grids, and urban walls.

At the regional scale, New Urbanism pays homage to the Garden City movement (Ghirardo, 1996, 159), a planning philosophy initiated by Ebenezer Howard in England, by concentrating development in compact communities in an open space framework that sets land aside for conservation, resource or recreational use. New Urbanists reinterpret these 19th century forms in an effort to balance contemporary environmental, social and fiscal challenges facing communities today. This approach to planning and design--the reinterpretation of traditional town planning and traditional architectural forms for contemporary living and modern methods of construction--is called neo-traditionalism.

New Urbanism in the U.S.

In 2000, there were approximately 410,000 housing units (built or planned) in 380 New Urban (NU) developments in 38 states. Florida, California, and North Carolina lead the nation in numbers of developments, with 47, 38, and 33 respectively. Florida also leads the nation in total NU housing units with approximately 46,700 units, but Texas (approx. 36,700 units) and California (approx. 35,000 units) are close behind.

While these figures sound impressive, total new urban housing represents less than 3% of the 13.6 million housing units built in the US between 1990-2000. Delaware, Utah and New Jersey are building a larger proportion of their overall share of the nation's housing as new urban than are other states (location quotients of 3.27, 1.86, and 1.83 respectively).

A Brief History:

While the movement's genesis can be traced to larger cultural and architectural shifts beginning in the 1960s, its formal architectural history is marked by the following key points.

Late 1970s: Robert Davis hires Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) to design Seaside, an 80-acre "resort town" on the Florida Panhandle. Projects by others designers, including Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon, Elizabeth Moule, and Stefanos Polyzoides, also question and challenge the patterns of American suburbia, namely the sprawling single use developments that surround most cities.

1991: These and other like-minded designers develop a set of community and regional design principles that could serve as an alternative to urban sprawl, and conceive a strategy for how cities and counties might implement these ideas. These ideas are outlined in the "Ahwahnee Principles," a document named after the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park where they presented their findings.

1993: The Ahwahnee group and others identify their shared interests and convene in Alexandria, Virginia to form the Congress for the New Urbanism. Initially, membership was by invitation only (Fulton 1996), but the group adopts a more open recruitment policy after formally cohering in Alexandria.

1996: The CNU holds its fourth congress in Charleston, South Carolina, and adopts the "Charter of the New Urbanism," a document that lists what the CNU believes are appropriate solutions to the challenges facing America's built environment, asserts the CNU's basic design principles, and claims who the organization represents.

2002: There are approximately 2000 registered CNU members from a wide range of professional backgrounds including architects, developers, planners, and politicians.

New Urbanism's Main Design Principles (neo-traditionalism):

The Charter can be transposed into some basic community design principles:

• "All development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods and/or districts" and that "such places should have clearly defined centers and edges" (CNU, 1996).
• The centers should have "a public space-such as a square, green or an important street intersection-and public buildings-such as a library, church or community center, a transit stop and retail businesses" (CNU, 1996).
• New Urban developments are pedestrian oriented and built around the concept of the five-minute walk from the center to any point in the development. Their neighborhoods and districts are compact but do not exclude automobiles altogether.
• Streets usually accommodate on-street parking and are narrower than those found in conventional suburban developments, two strategies to slow traffic and make the street more desirable for pedestrians.
• New Urban developments are designed on a grid or a modified grid street pattern that organizes buildings and public spaces into identifiable blocks, placing their entrances fronting the street.
• Ideally, public transit should connect neighborhoods/districts to one another, and to others in the surrounding region.
• New Urban developments include a diverse mix of activities (residences, shops, schools, workplaces and parks, etc.), and tend to be smaller than conventional single-use housing developments that serve a single market segment.
• New Urban developments offer a wide spectrum of housing options and should enable "people of a broad range of incomes, ages, and family types to live within a single neighborhood/district" (CNU, 1996).

Concerns & Criticism:

Rural communities considering New Urban development will benefit from understanding the following points:

• Because the CNU is comprised of a diverse group of designers, developers, planners, architects, government officials, it is inappropriate to categorize its membership as one body sharing a set of clearly defined common goals. CNU members do not agree on how to implement the ideals outlined in their charter. New Urbanism comes in many shapes and sizes, including large greenfield developments, renovated public housing (HOPE VI) projects, infill developments, adaptive re-use and brownfield projects. Furthermore, two strains of the movement are apparent: a more historically inspired East Coast strain and a more environmentally conscious West Coast strain. Communities considering New Urbanism should identify those characteristics that are most important and appropriate for their physical setting and social goals and objectives, and match them to an architect, planner or developer who shares and recognizes these same ideals.
  
  
• Developers have been limited by restrictive zoning ordinances that prohibit mixed use development or require inefficient setbacks, thus effectively making New Urbanism illegal in many jurisdictions. Jurisdictions interested in promoting New Urban principles might consider amending their zoning ordinances to allow for a clearer process of approval.
  
  
• While new urbanists have had great success over the last decade in building neo-traditional developments, they have also had great difficulty in achieving many of the social ideals outlined in the Charter of the New Urbanism. In particular, very few, if any, developments have attained their expected levels of income mixing, housing affordability, and retail viability.

CNU members offer several reasons for these shortcoming including:

• market factors beyond the control of the designer/developer;
• difficulties inherent in building affordable housing (e.g. diminishing federal, state or local funding and support for affordable housing, community resistance, and risks affecting the marketability of market-rate housing in developments with affordable housing);
• rapid housing price appreciation due to the desirability of NU developments, which erodes initial housing affordability;
• and reluctance on the part of the finance industry to lend for innovative or unconventional projects.

Research suggests other contributing factors including:

• the lack of a truly open and participatory planning process (i.e. invitation only planning and design charettes that exclude important stakeholders and/or under-represented groups);
• an absence of policies in their developments' codes, covenants and regulations that could help maintain initial housing affordability;
• too great a reliance on accessory units (above the garage apartments) for affordable housing--these units are too few in NU developments, are optional features rather than planned community elements, are not always affordable, are not covered by the Fair Housing Act (1988), and are often too small and/or inaccessible to serve the needs of the area's low-income population (Martin, 2001);
• an intentional market-upgrading of other identified NU affordable housing types such as the above-the-store apartment or "artist's-" or "poet's-lofts;"
• and an unrealistic expectation of the public's retail shopping preferences ((Martin 2001).

The CNU has not effectively addressed these issues, which limit its progress toward building the types of neighborhoods it describes in its charter. Communities considering neo-traditional planning are encouraged to develop programs and policies to address these shortcomings simultaneously with any physical plan or design.

Conclusion:

New Urbanism has a lot to offer rural communities¾a thoughtfully designed, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use and mixed-income built environment that recognizes the importance of natural and resource lands in the rural economy. It can be a smart strategy for rural development.

However, as Fulton (1996) advises, it is important to keep the New Urbanism in perspective. New Urbanism has been promoted by many of its proponents as a cure-all for the physical and social ills of the American built environment, but it is important that communities recognize that New Urbanism is, at its core, is an architectural movement that is first and foremost concerned with the physical aspects of community. There exists little empirical evidence to support the efficacy of physical solutions for social problems. The New Urbanism's concepts of street pattern, open-space, public amenity, and mixed-use are long-proven and sound urban design principles, and their re-introduction may be the movement's greatest contribution to the American planning scene. But, there is little evidence thus far that these have fulfilled the movement's promise of social performance. Studies to date on the social aspects of New Urbanism have not used adequate controls (e.g. a similarly placed non-new urban community for comparative analysis) or factored in the bias and/or the racial, social and economic homogeneity of its resident population.

It has become clear to many, including some at the CNU, that the physical remedies the New Urbanism offers will have little positive effect unless they are paired with a consistent set of polices and programs that cover the broader range of issues challenging our suburban and rural environments.

Works Cited:

CNU (1996). "Charter for the New Urbanism." Congress for the New Urbanism Web Site.

Fulton, W. (1996). The New Urbanism: Hope or Hype for American Communities? Cambridge, MA, Lincoln Land Institute.

Martin, J. D. (2001). Stein's Legacy: A Just City--Making The Affordable Housing/Diversity Connection in New Urbanism in Portland, Oregon. Thesis: City and Regional Planning. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University.

Jonathan Martin is a Ph.D. Student, Department of City and Regional Planning, Cornell University