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REAL PLACES AND VIRTUAL
COMMUNITIES
This technological challenge to traditional urban
space is not the first one in the history of the modern
city. For an earlier example we have to return briefly
to the 1960s, when the dispersed scale of the new
automobile landscape in America threatened to make
the traditional city obsolete. Even in Britain during the
1960s, proponents of picturesque urban design, the
kind so neatly captured in Gordon Cullen’s book
Townscape
, were still in the minority. This approach
to the design of pedestrian-friendly urban spaces
remained alive in Britain in only a very watered down
manner in the layout of several postwar New Towns.
In America, similar design principles that had been
characteristic of that country’s Romantic Garden
Suburbs of the 1890s through the 1920s all but dis-
appeared in the decades after World War II.
Designers like Cullen stayed focused on these
kinds of urban spaces because they believed they
could foster a sense of community and belonging
that was demonstrably absent in the voids between
the towers and slabs of high-rise housing and in the
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
22
Figure 1.11
Seaside, Florida, Duany and Plater-Zyberk, 1982. This modest development became the poster
child of traditional urbanism, but soon became the victim of its own success with escalating house prices,
fostering the (unfair) image of New Urbanism as the exclusive province of an elite middle class.
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dull repetition of developer-produced suburbia. The
placelessness of modernist cities and suburbs was
critiqued more savagely by commentators like Ian
Nairn, who, starting in the 1950s, routinely castigated
examples of miserable civic design in a regular column
in the 
Architectural Review
entitled ‘Outrage,’ and
extended this argument into the books 
Outrage
and
Counter-attack against Subtopia
(Nairn, 1955, 1957).
More often than not these bad examples were in sub-
urban situations that Nairn and others felt lacked any
sense of cohesion or traditional urbanity. Cullen’s
beautifully illustrated book dealt with the same sub-
ject matter, but its message pushed architects more
gently towards a re-appreciation of traditional spaces
and city textures and this concern blended easily with
Jane Jacobs’ American praise for the traditional
streets of her New York urban neighborhood.
But at the very time in the early to mid-1960s,
that some architects and urbanists were retracing
their steps toward the traditional city, progressive
planners began to challenge these concepts as out-
moded and unrealistic in the new culture based on
expanded personal mobility and the automobile. Not
surprisingly this challenge came from America,
where, in 1963 and 1964, the academic planner
Melvin Webber from Berkeley, California, wrote two
influential articles entitled 
Order in Diversity:
Community without Propinquity
and 
The Urban Place
and the Nonplace Urban Realm
, in which he rejected
models of the city based on traditional spatial pat-
terns. Webber and others argued that it was a mistake
to critique the expanding city as shapeless sprawl, and
to long for traditional streets and squares, because
this missed the point that the car had changed the
relationship between space and time in cities. People
now conceptualized distance not in miles, but in
minutes, based on the time it took to drive to their
destinations. Propinquity, being near everything one
needed, was no longer a necessity for mobile families.
Instead of defined physical places in the traditional
townscape sense of spatial enclosure and walking dis-
tances, the new city was based on a pattern of disper-
sal, where individuals and families constructed their
sense of the city from a series of physically discontin-
uous locations, connected only by driving. The city
was no longer experienced as an integrated hierarchy
of places and neighborhoods. Instead it became a
non-hierarchical network where locations were
equalized by their accessibility by car.
Webber’s argument that the automobile would
release people from the ties that bound them to partic-
ular places, and open up new possibilities of mobility
and connections with a wide variety of locations, coin-
cided with the explosive growth of American suburban
development in the 1950s and 1960s. New housing
subdivisions, shopping centers and office parks were
built on open land with few spatial constraints, and
connected by the ubiquitous system of what were then
high-speed commuter freeways. The real point of
Webber’s thesis, however, was not simply that it was
possible to move around easily to lots of different
places, or that a new architecture could evolve from
the technologies of movement, but that at a deep, fun-
damental level,