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laissez-faire
economics view the
world as inhabited only by self-focused consumers
and taxpayers; the whole premise of urban design and
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collaborative planning is anathema to them because
it’s based upon public-spirited concepts of common
good and integrated, long-term public interest.
It is hard to remain dispassionate in this context.
Groups like this make the lives of urban designers and
planners difficult because they are usually well funded,
and cleverly organized. Countering their propaganda
and regular attacks on Smart Growth can be almost a
full-time job in itself, but we can take some comfort
from the increasing fervor of the anti-Smart Growth
message. The increased opposition shows that concepts
of Smart Growth are successfully gaining ground in
the market place, and in the mind of the American
public as more and more walkable, transit-supportive
developments are constructed. Ordinary Americans
can increasingly see the advantages for themselves.
The extent and determination of this political
opposition to progressive planning in the USA
distinguishes American professional practice from its
British counterpart. While democratic protest against
development of all sorts has a long and venerable tra-
dition in the UK, the organized, national campaign,
focused from one end of the political spectrum on
the work of architects and planners has few equiva-
lents in Britain. For our right-wing opponents, Smart
Growth and New Urbanism are combined and
inflated into one single threat to ‘American freedom.’
But New Urbanism itself often comes under separate
attacks from within the architectural profession and
academia. The most common of these are the accu-
sations of romantic nostalgia, and avoiding the ‘reali-
ties’ of the contemporary city. These charges appear
in many critiques of traditional urbanism (Forty
and Moss, 1980; Ingersoll, 1989; Sudjic, 1992;
Rybczynski, 1995; Landecker, 1996; Huxtable,
1997; Chase, Crawford and Kaliski, 1999). These
critics characterize New Urbanism as an escapist
desire to avoid complex realities by returning to a
rose-tinted imagined past, even a falsification of
history (Ellis, 2002). English critics in the 1980s
attacked the ‘pseudo-vernacular’ as promoting a false
mythology of rural village life, while some American
commentators accuse New Urbanists of using tradi-
tional urban forms to promote a fantasy world of small
town America, where the memories of unpleasant facts
like racial segregation are expunged from history.
Other writers falsely identify New Urbanism with low-
density suburbs, and claim its practitioners are ‘dismis-
sive of the present urban landscape’ (Kaliski, 1999).
This is linked with the criticism that regularly surfaces
in academic and other writings is the charge that
New Urbanists want to impose a sanitized, simplified
representation of reality on the complex pluralism that
is the contemporary city (Safdie, 1997).
It seems to us that all these criticisms are based on
a caricature of New Urbanism, either falsely constructed
for the purposes of theoretical argument, or simply
based on a massive misreading of the circumstances.
It is as if these critics believe for their own purposes
that New Urbanism begins and ends with the cute
aesthetics of Seaside, instead of being a multifaceted
urban and environmental movement. The reader can
be the best judge of whether the work illustrated in
the case studies in Chapters 7–12 is guilty as charged,
or whether the critics miss their aim by a mile. When
we’re working with residents in a poor African-
American neighborhood to bring them affordable
housing and a dignified environment (Chapter 11)
it’s laughable (almost insulting) to accuse New
Urbanism of escapism and avoiding unpleasant facts
from America’s history. When we work to manage the
ecology of a suburban region by protecting its natural
infrastructure; by setting out policies and designs for
a better balance of jobs and housing to reduce com-
muting and improve air quality; and by integrating
transit options into the future lives of all sectors of
the population, (Chapter 7), it’s equally galling for
this kind of work to be misrepresented as the imposi-
tion of a singular, limited vision out of touch with
reality and demonstrating a ‘carelessness towards
existing conditions’ (Kaliski, 1999: p. 101).
The disdain some academic theorists have for New
Urbanism is predicated on the fact that the language
of traditional urbanism has been able to build a
bridge between design theory and development
practice. Our colleagues in academia like to argue
that our ideas have merely become commodified, co-
opted and transformed into shallow concepts useful
to a developer in maximizing his or her profit.
Academics, and some professional architects, tend to
feel tainted by the association with developers, and
seek to distance themselves from the ‘sullied’ environ-
ment of the marketplace.
We find this convergence of design theory and
development practice unusual – but helpful. We are
used to being in conflict with developers, and finding
ourselves more in harmony with traditional adver-
saries can be disorienting. Only a decade ago at the
beginning of the 1990s, to propose ideas of tradi-
tional urbanism in the context of American sprawl
was to invite scorn and derision from developers and
builders. In terms of slowing or stopping the jugger-
naut of sprawl this alliance between theory and prac-
tice, between design and development, embryonic
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though it is, is an essential bond, to be nurtured in
every way possible. Now of all times is not the time
to break away in search of new theoretical forms of
urbanism while parts of our cities decay and our envi-
ronment is degraded. As a society, we have our work
cut out to improve our American habitat before these
problems reach unmanageable proportions.
Urban design in America involves trying to make
order out of chaos. While theoreticians and fellow aca-
demics might laud this chaos as vital and exuberant,
most people who have to live and work in it just find it
ugly and depressing. Believe us: it is. (See Figure 2.13).
The denigration of New Urbanism, and the call to
teach ‘chaos theory instead of Italian hill towns’ often
heard in architectural schools rings hollow to those of
us engaged in trying to improve this mess on the
ground. Fancy theories from Europe and America that
celebrate concepts of cacophony, discontinuity,
fragmentation and spatial fluidity, and a disdain for
traditional urban space in favor of ‘zones of transition’
(Koolhas and Mau, 1995: p. 1162) are fine from the
luxurious context of an historic European city or an
American ivory tower. But out in the spatial purga-
tory that comprises much of the American built
landscape of the last fifty years such privileged intel-
lectualizations have little relevance. Urban design is
not about surfing chaos; it is about providing clarity
and humanity in a harsh and confusing world, and
saving our environment from our society’s selfish
depredations. Traditional urbanism – the world of the
street, square and urban block – is not a quixotic
effort to recreate an American past that didn’t exist
(Ellis, 2002: p. 267). It modernizes and retrofits his-
torical patterns that are still relevant today, accepting
the most advanced technologies, and matching the
emerging new demographics in American society. It is
the best weapon we have in our quest for a sustainable
urban future.
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