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Figure 1.12
Camden Road, Charlotte, NC. At the
heart of an evolving urban neighborhood, the street
outside the authors’ studio is occasionally taken over
by an arts and crafts market.
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place, Kevin Kelly, a leading prophet of the ‘geography
is dead’ theme, qualifies this assertion by admitting
that distinctive places retain their value, and that this
value will increase despite the non-spatial dimension of
information technology (Kelly: pp. 94–5, in Florida:
p. 219).
Given their flexible and unpredictable work sched-
ules, creative professionals require access to recre-
ational and entertainment opportunities at a moment’s
notice (see Figure 1.13). They increasingly act ‘like
tourists in their own city’ (Lloyd and Clark, 2001, in
Florida: p. 225) and require amenities close at hand,
within walking distance if possible. There is only one
kind of urbanism that can meet this need: the tradi-
tional public spaces of street and square, park and
boulevard. 
At an urban design conference in Melbourne,
Australia, in 2001, author Joel Garreau, best known
for his seminal book 
Edge City
, noted that cities are
changing faster today than at any time for 150 years,
and that computers are reshaping our urban world to
favor places that provide and nourish face-to-face con-
tact. Garreau expressed his belief that the urban future
could ‘look like the eighteenth century, only cooler.’
Edge cities and downtowns ‘that are sterile and
charmless will die.’ In common with the observations
of Richard Florida, Garreau believes the primary pur-
pose of future cities will be to provide optimum con-
ditions for face-to-face contact, an ancient but still
primary human need (Garreau, 2001). In this con-
text, good urban design and traditional public space
are crucial in providing the appropriate environment
for these human activities. We would go so far as to
say that New Urbanism in America, derided by oppo-
nents in academia as a reactionary, nostalgic move-
ment, in fact provides the best opportunity to create
the urbanity necessary for the creative class – and ulti-
mately the rest of us – to function fruitfully. Other
critics mock this search for a more walkable urban
future as the ‘café society’ and often dub such efforts
at community building as ‘latté towns.’ These com-
mentators, pontif icating from the sidelines, see such
urban villages only as the commodification of urban
experience, reducing the richness of public life to
mere spectacle and entertainment courtesy of
Starbucks, The Gap, Victoria’s Secret and Williams-
Sonoma. We’re well aware of these dangers in newly
minted developments of the type we’ll discuss later in
more detail, but even so, we beg to differ. In contrast
to our critics, we believe the (re)creation of traditional
urban places offers the best hope of a sustainable
urban future for America’s cities and suburbs.
As witness to this belief, a symposium entitled
‘Thinking Creatively For Our Economic Future’ fea-
turing Richard Florida at the University of North
Carolina at Charlotte in April 2003, brought together
nearly two hundred people from the Charlotte region
to brainstorm ideas that would increase the economic
competitiveness for the city and surrounding coun-
ties in the global marketplace. There were only a
handful of design professionals in the audience, but
of all the dozens of innovative ideas discussed, the top
recommendation of the day by a large margin was the
creation of new urban spaces and public places where
people could connect with each other and thus spur
the creation of ideas. This strategy is called ‘designing
for collisions,’ and we think of this by a simple anal-
ogy of molecules bumping into each other and cre-
ating reactions. The more molecules that bump
around in a space the more creative collisions occur,
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES