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Part of this radical conservatism derives from the
considerable influence of the European urbanist,
Leon Krier. Duany and Plater-Zyberk acknowledge
the impact of Krier, and his neo-rationalist ideas
derived from the European city, on the planning of
Seaside. Krier was a consultant during the design
process of that landmark community, and has
remained an important contributor to New Urbanist
theory. Duany described hearing a lecture on tradi-
tional urbanism by Krier while he and Plater-Zyberk
were still working in Arquitectonica, the Miami
architectural firm best known for its flashy high-rises.
As a result, the husband and wife team underwent a
profound change of direction in their work. (http://
applied.math.utsa.edu/krier/).
In Europe during the 1970s, Krier was a leading
advocate of the Movement for the Reconstruction of
the European City, whose major themes included:
the preservation of historic centers; the use of historic
urban types and urban patterns such as the street, the
square and the neighborhood (or 
quartier
in Krier’s
lexicon) as the basis for new city development; and
the reconstruction of single-use residential ‘bedroom
suburbs’ into articulate mixed-use neighborhoods.
While the specific European urban pattern s and types
were transformed by their travel across the Atlantic dur-
ing the following decade, these underlying theoretical
principles became founding concepts for Traditional
Neighborhood Development in the 1980s and made
their way into New Urbanist theory in the 1990s.
Krier’s focus on the European urban quarter 
was matched by Dauny and Platter-Zyberk’s revived
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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CHAPTER THREE
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TRADITIONAL URBANISM
57
interest in the American neighborhood concept of
social planner Clarence Perry, first promulgated in the
early 1920s and more fully developed as part of the
1929 First Regional Plan of New York. Perry was
active in the American Regional Planning Association
with Lewis Mumford and Clarence Stein and Henry
Wright, the architect-planners of Radburn. Perry’s
training as a sociologist had taught him the impor-
tance of cohesive neighborhoods as political, social,
and even moral units of a city. Moreover, Perry lived
in the New York railroad suburb of Forest Hills
Gardens (noted in Chapter 1), and this experience
stimulated his concept of the neighborhood unit as
the fundamental unit of city planning. In his 1929
monograph for the Regional Plan of New York, Perry
wrote from first-hand experience about the value of
high quality urban design in fostering the good spirit
and character of a neighborhood, and created a plan
diagram of a typical neighborhood layout (Perry,
1929: pp. 90–3; in Hall, 2002: p. 132). This diagram
illustrated a hypothetical area bounded by major
roads with community facilities, including a school
and a park, at the center (see Figure 3.2).
Central to Perry’s concept was the ability of all resi-
dents to walk to those facilities they needed on a daily
basis, such as shops, schools and playgrounds. The
size of the neighborhood was determined by a five-
minute walking distance from center to edge, approx-
imately 1/4-mile, creating a population of about 5000
people, large enough to support local shops but small
enough to generate a sense of community (Broadbent
p. 126). The street pattern was a mixture of radial
avenues interspersed with irregular straight and curv-
ing grids with small parks and playgrounds liberally
scattered throughout. Shopping was located along the
edge at the intersections of the main roads within the
five-minute walking distance for most residents.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk developed this same con-
cept and updated it for American urban conditions of
the late twentieth century. In their 
Lexicon of New
Urbanism
(DPZ, 2002) they illustrated a similar sized
urban area, bounded by highways, and scaled to the
five-minute, 1/4-mile walk. In this contemporary ver-
sion, more extensive commercial development is
located along the edges of the bounding highways,
and a street of mixed-use buildings leads from one
corner into the central public park, where community
institutions and some local shops are located. The
school has moved to the edge, due to much larger
space requirements for playing fields and parking, and
this educational facility is now shared between neigh-
borhoods. Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s street grid is
tighter and more organized than Perry’s but is similar
in concept to the original (see Figure 3.3).
Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s understanding how
powerful diagrams can be in regulating development
and promoting good urban design is one of the most
important contributions to urban design and town
planning in contemporary America. This claim is
based on the duo’s revolutionary innovation of graphic
NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT 1927
Pedestrain shed 
one-quarter mile radius
Civic space at center
Many playgrounds
Neighborhood institutions 
and schools within
High capacity 
thoroughfares at the edge
Regional institutions at 
the edge
Shopping at traffic 
junctions at the edge