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Figure 6.4
Ashburton, Devon, UK. The physical
expansion of the town is strictly limited to preserve
the working farmland around its edges. A modest
new development of townhomes is just visible in the
middle of the photograph (a white gable and two
long parallel roofs) fitting in between adjacent
buildings and backing up to the fields.
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American readers will remember that the British
planning system operates on the principle that pri-
vate ownership of land does not automatically convey
development rights. These rights are conferred on
certain properties according to the provisions of the
communally agreed development plans, and the
democratically open process of plan development
and revision enables all viewpoints to be heard and
priorities agreed upon. In the case of many commu-
nities in South Devon, the agreed priorities have
everything to do with conserving the natural beauty
of the area for environmental and economic benefit.
Ironically, the rural county outside Charlotte
where Mary Newsom gave her talk also contains
much beautiful scenery and productive farmland
sprinkled with pleasant small towns. But new free-
ways are bringing this rural idyll within easy com-
muting reach of Charlotte, and developers are lining
up greenfield sites for conventional suburban devel-
opment. Local politicians are getting ready to com-
pete for new strip centers and gas stations and
big-box stores to boost their tax revenues to meet the
financial costs of new schools, water and sewer lines,
and police and fire protection services for the new
residential subdivisions that will inevitably appear.
Many of the qualities that make the area so delightful
are headed for extinction as development paves over
the landscape, substituting rural beauty with urban
mediocrity.
The county authorities are unprepared to deal
with these formidable challenges and have few public
policy tools to allow them much control over the pat-
terns of development other than assisting non-profit
land conservation organizations to purchase some
small parcels of land that are most threatened by new
building. In contrast to places like Ashburton, small
towns in the countryside outside Charlotte have little
chance of retaining their residual historic character,
or of protecting their rural heritage in any meaning-
ful way. Without some unforeseen civic miracle, they
are doomed to be smothered in sprawl.
The natural reaction to this gloomy future is to
preserve as much open space as possible, and in the
minds of many Americans, citizens and elected offi-
cials alike, there is a false assumption that preserving
open space is a panacea for sprawl. This is far from
the case, for in many instances preserved open spaces
exist as unconnected pockets surrounded by develop-
ment. Saving open space is too often a reactive ges-
ture to stop development, rather than the enactment
of a coherent rural vision. Preserving open space
must be part of such a comprehensive conservation
vision for a protected or enhanced countryside, and
this rural vision must be complemented by an equiv-
alent 
urban
vision. We can’t make better towns and
cities just by preserving woodlands and meadows. We
are delighted when citizens and their elected officials
want to preserve farmland, or protect natural habitat.
But we are dismayed when those same folks demon-
strate no corresponding passion about urban areas.
Our case studies try to remedy that omission by pre-
senting a compelling vision of urbanity to comple-
ment preserved countryside.
These visions of urbanity usually coalesce around
some sort of urban village, the idea that keeps crop-
ping up throughout this book. The regeneration of
city centers is one congruency between British and
American urbanism in the early years of the twenty-
first century, and the urban village is the second.
While the physical settings of British and American
cities are markedly dissimilar, except for their reviv-
ing central areas, the urban village concept has
assumed considerable relevance in both countries
(Darley et al., 1991; Aldous, 1992; Sucher, 1995).
This type of development satisfies European objec-
tives of sustainability as well as American lifestyle and
demographic trends; as we’ve already noted, it’s
becoming the strategy of choice in the USA for rede-
veloping out-of-date shopping centers as mixed-use
centers, and for building new mixed-use ‘town cen-
tres’ in the far flung suburbs.
These same lifestyle-related demographics are also
present in Europe, where the same quest for active,
trendy urban living emerged in the 1990s as a power-
ful ally of environmental goals for sustainable urban-
ism, which increasingly became a matter of public
policy in Europe during the 1990s. Sustainability
isn’t totally absent from the American agenda (wit-
ness Peter Calthorpe’s original Pedestrian Pockets of
the late 1980s and the subsequent emphasis on
transit-oriented development) but movements toward
higher goals of urban sustainability and energy effi-
ciency remain objectives of dedicated professionals
rather than a matter of public policy.
A key study in the quest for a usable definition of
sustainable urban form came from Australia in 1989,
where two planners, Peter Newman and Jeffrey
Kenworthy compared the use of energy by urban
Australians, Americans and Europeans (Hall, 2002:
p. 414). Not surpisingly, Americans used most
energy, the Australians came in second and the
Europeans were the most frugal of the three study
groups. The researchers related this energy use to the
spatial character of cities and the availability of public
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transport, and concluded that the compactness of
European cities combined with the high standard
of public transport accounted for the lower figures of
energy consumption. From this conclusion came the
oft-repeated wisdom that the most sustainable form
of urban development was one that restricted the
geographical spread to a defined area and then served
this area with good public transportation. The corol-
lary to this was that cities and neighborhoods should
be denser, and have a mixture of uses within walking
distance. Bingo! The urban village was born.
The twin typologies of New Urbanism, Calthorpe’s
Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) and Duany
and Plater-Zyberk’s Traditional Neighborhood
Development (TND), were paralleled in Britain by
the urban villages promoted by the Urban Villages
Group (Aldous, 1992, 1995). Explicit connections
were drawn in America to traditional urban types of
the small town and streetcar suburb, as well as to
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and the Anglo-
American Garden Suburb. In the UK, British market
towns and their architecture substituted for
American models, but the other sources were the
same. It appeared as if avant-garde architect-planners
on both sides of the Atlantic had reinvented the
wheel (Hall, 2002: p. 415).
The demographic shifts evident in Britain and
America that help generate the need for ‘new’
solutions like the urban village are most easily cate-
gorized as a move away from conventional nuclear
families into more and smaller households.
Especially notable in both countries is the growth in
single person households. Adults of all ages are liv-
ing alone with the compensatory expectation of a
richer and more sociable public life. In America this
demand is being partly met by the market-driven
distribution of these new households in all three
locations noted earlier, the city center, revitalized
suburban centers in the older suburbs, and new sub-
urban centers at the metropolitan periphery. In
Britain, government policy since the late 1990s has
explicitly required that the majority of such new
development take place on existing, reconditioned
brownfield sites to minimize suburban extensions
into the green belts around cities. While this makes
good sense in terms of sustainable city form, this
formula also had more pragmatic roots. It was