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Figure 3.4
Excerpts from the Regulating Code for Davidson, NC, Walters and Keane, 1995. These two code
pages establish the three-dimensional controls for apartment buildings in terms of urban form and building
scale and massing. The emphasis here and in all other aspects of the code is making sure that buildings
contribute effectively to making properly defined public spaces – the streets, squares and parks of the
community. (
Diagrams courtesy of the Town of Davidson, NC
)
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location of failed shopping malls or other outdated
commercial development (CNU, 2002). Calthorpe’s
successful reconstruction of an 18-acre derelict mall
in Mountain View, California (1996–2001) into a
mixed-use neighborhood where all residents live
within a five-minute walk to a train station exempli-
fies this trend. This more integrated vision of an
energy efficient, and less car-dependent lifestyle
embodied in Transit-oriented Development derives
from the longstanding interest among Calthorpe and
his west coast collaborators in environmental and
ecological issues, dating from their work on architec-
ture and renewable energy in the 1970s. This agenda
for a more sustainable urban environment has become
a central one for many architects and planners who
consider themselves New Urbanists, and during the
1990s it married with a rural counterpart developed
by the planner Randall Arendt, and exemplified in
his influential book, 
Rural by Design: Maintaining
Small Town Character
(Arendt, 1994).
Arendt’s main contribution to New Urbanism and
Smart Growth has been to approach the design of
small town environments from the position of
preserving the rural character of the surrounding
countryside threatened by suburban expansion. His
design approach first establishes the important rural
features and landscape components of the property
to be developed, safeguards these areas from building
activity, and only then inserts new development
carefully into the natural setting. By clustering
development, more land can be set aside as perma-
nently protected open space, and in many instances
this ethos of landscape preservation has added
considerable value to new housing. Americans have
shown they will spend more money to live near
protected green space (see Figure 2.16).
With careful planning at the community scale,
these areas of open space can be connected together
to create a long-lasting green infrastructure for the
environmental benefit of the community (Arendt,
1994, 1996). One downside of this otherwise admir-
able approach is that the extra economic value con-
ferred on properties developed in this manner raises
the cost of housing above the level many people can
afford. To overcome this objection, the town of
Davidson, North Carolina, has enacted a zoning
ordinance that both requires the preservation of
50 percent open space in new greenfield develop-
ments, and the provision of 12.5 percent of the new
housing to be at price ranges refined as affordable,
that is, accessible to people earning 80 percent of
the national median income (Davidson, 2000).
Taken together, these visions of urban and rural
sustainability provide the strongest argument for New
Urbanism in its alliance with the Smart Growth
movement, and indeed, for New Urbanism to be
synonymous with Smart Growth.
While Leon Krier was a major influence on the
development of this New Urbanist agenda, his was by
no means the only European influence. The work of
several architects and urbanists who played crucial
roles in the historical development of the Anglo-
American city also contributed to New Urbanist
theory and practice. A reprise of the range of influ-
ences brings back into focus several personalities we
have already met earlier in the text. We have noted
that Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City reform
movement, with its emphasis on well-planned, self-
contained new towns served by transit and defined
by large tracts of productive countryside, was also an
important precedent for the TOD strand of New
Urbanist theory. The work of Raymond Unwin, and
his brother-in-law Barry Parker has also been crucial.
We explained in Chapter 2 how Unwin and Parker
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES