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THE ORIGINS, CONCEPTS AND
EVOLUTION OF NEW URBANISM
We’ve never liked the name ‘The New Urbanism.’ In
our work with communities, we stuck to ‘traditional
town planning’ or ‘neo-traditional development’ as
long as we could, but the momentum of general
usage, and the branding of traditional urban forms as
New Urbanism was eventually irreversible.
We didn’t like the term because it got in the way of
our work in community design. Most American sub-
urban communities grappling with suburban growth
pressures don’t want to be ‘new.’ Newness, in the
form of new development, is seen by many as the
source of the problems growth brings. And many
communities we work with, except those that com-
prise neighborhoods within cities, don’t want to be
urban. Citizens moved out of the cities to the sub-
urbs precisely to avoid urbanity, or at least what they
perceived as urban. So the name erected two unnec-
essary barriers from the outset.
In our practice, we now tend to use the terms
‘New Urbanism’ and ‘Smart Growth’ as synonyms.
Indeed, because of our discomfort with the title ‘New
Urbanism’ we have come to use Smart Growth
almost universally, liberally sprinkled with references
to traditional neighborhood design and ‘urban
villages.’ The English heritage and experience of one
of the authors means he has been designing with the
concepts now classified as New Urbanism since the
1970s, long before the term was coined, and some
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Traditional urbanism: New 
Urbanism and Smart Growth
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DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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time before its precursor, Neo-Traditional Develop-
ment was invented in America in the early 1980s.
However, the lineage of the design and planning
movement in America that became New Urbanism is
important to review, as several misconceptions still
attach themselves to the public’s (and the design
professions’) understanding of the term.
The name ‘The New Urbanism’ was consciously
chosen in the early to mid-1990s to mark the merging
of Traditional Neighborhood Development, developed
on the east coast of America by Duany and Plater-
Zyberk (2002), with Transit-oriented Development
which evolved synchronously on the west coast largely
through the work of Peter Calthorpe, Doug Kelbaugh,
and Daniel Solomon. The conjoined movement devel-
oped a manifesto for urbanism in the postmodern city
specifically as a counterpoint to the Charter of Athens,
the 1942 document that codified the modernist view
of urbanity. The new charter, the Charter of The New
Urbanism, was signed into being at the Fourth
Congress of The New Urbanism in 1996 at Charleston,
South Carolina. This urbanism, based on the return to
traditional urban forms and typologies, was defined as
‘new’ in contrast to the old and discredited urban lan-
guage of modernism. And it was to be ‘urban’ by creat-
ing a coherent urban structure to counteract the faults
of a sprawling suburban model of city development.
However, this rebirth of traditional urbanism in
the 1980s did not happen in a vacuum: it was neces-
sarily preceded by the final demise of modernist
urban theory that came to pass during the 1970s.
During those years American architects had been
faced with two stark facts about their contributions
to the nation’s cities – the failure of modernist design
theories in the inner city programs of urban
renewal – and the profession’s lack of any success in
shaping suburbia into an attractive and efficient
form. The year 1972 in particular administered two
unsettling shocks to architects: the publication of