Thoughts on New Urbanism

Today is full of preparations for the big trip so I don't have too much for you but I did find an interesting article in the local weekly at my parents house. They live in a suburb of Lansing and the article was an extended interview with the township supervisor. At one point she lamented the board's recent approval of a mixed use development code that had allowed a very large project to be approved. As she described it, the project was clearly inappropriate for the township as a whole as well as its immediate surroundings. In addition, she showed great concern that businesses would be drawn there from more traditional strip malls which would then face bankruptcy and blight.

I think this illustrates the difficulty that suburban governments--which often lack the authority or funds to fight off unwanted development--face as they transition to mixed use zoning. I don't think that zoning is a particularly effective tool. Zoning isn't the only reason that suburbs all have the same feel, the economics practiced by seasoned developers all come from the same place and all come to the same conclusions.

Mixed use zoning simply does not result in vibrant self-sustaining developments. I'm not certain whether this is caused by uninspired developers superimposing strip malls on tract housing or by archaic code restrictions that have yet to be updated to the new code. I suspect the problem lies with both the developers and with concerned citizens who don't know what to be concerned about.

This is my main problem with New Urbanism, it doesn't accurately reflect the differences between cities and outlying areas. Specifically, it doesn't accept that cities are inherently good and productive places.

Towns are small places. People know one another. They don't want strangers coming near their places of habitation because the only protection towns offer from outsiders is isolation. The Garden City concept that has been duplicated over and over again was never intended to function as a city, but as a town where everyone knows their neighbors. Geographic isolation provided safety.

Modern day suburban planners have tried to introduce this isolation with dead ends, tangles of streets, a lack of through streets...etc. New Urbanism tries to roll back these and other alterations to the Garden City concept without realizing (I'll give them the benefit of doubt) that it is the assumption that must be challenged.

Isolation is folly. Unlike Ebenezer Howard's turn of the (last) century England, we have the technology to build clean, healthy and pleasant cities that people would flock to live in. There is no need to "escape" from the city. All we need is to start building real ones. High density, high building footprint, no silly zoning restrictions. New Urbanism, with their "prescriptive" zoning only creates the appearance of cities (or of towns that were emulating cities) while maintaining the limited functionality of small towns.

In the end, mixed use New Urbanism isn't right for suburbs. The suburbs are a wrong. The solution is to let them devolve into the agriculture that they once were and carve out the suburban projects from cities so that they can become wonderful urban places.