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Figure 1.10
Modern versions of traditional urban
forms; Gloucester Green market square, Oxford, UK,
1987–90.
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initially known as Neo-Traditional Development or
Traditional Neighbourhood Development (TND). As
we discuss in detail in Chapter 3, the co-mingling of
Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s TND on the east coast with
Peter Calthorpe’s experiments with ‘pedestrian
pockets,’ or Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) on
the west coast in the late 1980s gave rise to the
movement now known as New Urbanism in 1993. In
the subsequent 10 years, these once radical ideas about
city and suburban design have gained considerable
acceptance in the development community. However,
many battles remain to be fought; it is still much 
easier in America to produce standard suburban
sprawl than to create sustainable mixed-use urban
communities.
In academia, it was New Urbanism’s historicist lean-
ings that engendered a negative reaction in many
American schools of architecture. The return to tradi-
tional types of urbanism came under challenge from
academic architects who saw this reversion to tradi-
tionalism as a retreat from the high intellectual ground
of modernity, or the convoluted games of postmoder-
nity, into the reactionary romance of nostalgia.
Moreover, professors at prestigious architectural insti-
tutions found it uncomfortable, even demeaning, to
be associated with ideas that were gaining currency in
the ‘soiled’ world of the marketplace. But more
important than this American squabble, the rele-
vance of traditional urbanism was challenged by rev-
olutionary developments in another sphere – in
information technology. The creation of ‘virtual’
space on the Internet as a competitor to ‘real’ space in
communities poses new challenges and dilemmas for
our society, and for the professions of architecture
and planning. It is to that conflict of paradigms that
we must now direct our attention.