Real Estate Articles
New Urbanism
New urbanism is an urban design movement whose popularity increased
beginning in the 1980s and early 1990s.
The goal of new urbanists is to reform all aspects of real estate development
and urban planning. These include everything from urban retrofits, to
suburban infill.
There are some common elements of new urbanist design. New urbanist
neighborhoods are walkable, and are designed to contain a diverse range
of housing and jobs. New urbanists support regional planning for open
space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development
of jobs and housing. They believe these strategies are the best way
to reduce the time people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of
affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl. Many other issues,
such as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the
renovation of brownfield land are also covered in the Charter of the
New Urbanism, the movement's seminal document. Because new urbanist
designs include many of the features (like mixed use and emphasis on
walkability) which characterized urban areas in the pre-automobile age,
the movement is sometimes known as Traditional neighborhood design.
About new urbanism
(Adapted from "The New Urbanism: An alternative to modern, automobile-oriented
planning and development" by Robert Steuteville, editor and publisher,
New Urban News, 2004.)
Background
Through the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States was
developed in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods. The pattern
began to change with the emergence of modern architecture and zoning
and ascension of the automobile. After World War II, a new system of
development was implemented nationwide, replacing neighborhoods with
a rigorous separation of uses that has become known as conventional
suburban development, or sprawl. The majority of US citizens now live
in suburban communities built in the last 50 years.
Although conventional suburban development has been popular, it carries
a significant price. Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, conventional
suburban development spreads out to consume large areas of countryside
even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita
has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for the great majority
of household and commuter trips.
Those who cannot drive are significantly restricted in their mobility.
The working poor living in suburbia spend a large portion of their incomes
on cars. Meanwhile, the American landscape where most people live and
work is dominated by strip malls, auto-oriented civic and commercial
buildings, and subdivisions without much individuality or character.
Trends
The new urbanism is a reaction to sprawl. A growing movement of architects,
planners, and developers, new urbanism is based on principles of planning
and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable
communities. New urbanists take a wide variety of approaches—some work
exclusively on infill projects, others focus on transit-oriented development,
still others are attempting to transform the suburbs, and many are working
in all of these categories. New urbanism includes traditional architects
and those with modernist sensibilities. All, however, believe in the
power and ability of traditional neighborhoods to restore functional,
sustainable communities. Early in the 1960s, Jane Jacobs authored The
Death and Life of Great American Cities, which set the precendent for
the new urbanist trend by condemning the accepted planning theories
of the time; calling for an increased effort by planners to reconsider
the failing single-use housing projects, large car-dependent thoroughfares,
and segregated commercial centers that had become the "norm"
of civic planning and zoning thought. Another mid-twentieth century
writer that inspired the new urbanist movement was the social philosopher/historian
Lewis Mumford, who criticized the "anti-urban" development
of post-war America.
Today's popular trend of new urbanism had its roots in the work of maverick
architects, planners, and theorists, like Jacobs, who believed that
the conventional planning thought was gradually failing in one way or
another. In the 1970s and 1980s, these new ideas emerged, and eventually
coalesced into a unified group in the 1990s. From modest beginnings,
the trend is beginning to have a substantial impact. More than 600 new
towns, villages, and neighborhoods are planned or under construction
in the U.S., using principles of new urbanism. Additionally, hundreds
of small-scale new urban infill projects are restoring the urban fabric
of cities and towns by reestablishing walkable streets and blocks.
On the regional scale, new urbanism is having a growing influence on
how and where metropolitan regions choose to grow. At least 14 large-scale
planning initiatives are based on the principles of linking transportation
and land-use policies and using the neighborhood as the fundamental
building block of a region.
In Maryland and several other states, new urbanist principles are an
integral part of smart growth legislation.
Moreover, new urbanism is beginning to have widespread impact on conventional
development. Mainstream developers are adopting new urban design elements
such as garages in the rear of houses, neighborhood greens and mixed-use
town centers. Projects that adopt some principles of new urbanism but
remain largely conventional in design are known as hybrids.
Old and new urbanism
The new urbanism trend goes by other names, including neotraditional
design, transit-oriented development, and traditional neighborhood development.
Borrowing from urban design concepts throughout history, new urbanism
does not, and cannot merely replicate old communities. New houses within
neighborhoods, for example, must provide modern living spaces and amenities
that consumers demand (and that competing suburban tract homes offer).
Stores and businesses must have sufficient parking, modern floor plans,
and connections to automobile and pedestrian traffic, and/or transit
systems.
With proper design, large office, light industrial, and even "big
box" retail buildings can be situated in a walkable new urbanist
neighborhood. Parking lots, the most prominent feature of conventional
commercial districts, are accommodated to the side, the rear or basement
of new urban businesses. The size of lots are reduced through shared
parking, on-street parking, and shifts to other modes of transportation.
Another difference between old and new urbanism is the street grid.
Most historic cities and towns in the US employ a grid that is relentlessly
regular. New urbanists often use a "modified" grid, with "T"
intersections and street deflections to calm traffic and increase visual
interest.
That blending of old and new is the basis of the adjective neotraditional,
a term that carries a lot of baggage, especially with modernists, who
see it as an architectural "style." However, it is more of
an urban design approach that borrows from the past while adapting to
the present and future. The very fact that new urbanists must meet the
demands of the marketplace keeps them grounded in reality. Successful
new urbanism performs a difficult balancing act by maintaining the integrity
of a walkable, human-scale neighborhood while offering modern residential
and commercial "product" to compete with conventional suburban
development. New urbanists who cannot compete with conventional development
or find a niche that is poorly served by the real estate industry are
doomed to failure.
The difficulty of that balancing act is one reason why many developers
choose to build hybrids, instead of adopting all of the principles of
new urbanism. Some new urbanists think that hybrids pose a serious threat
to the movement, because they usually borrow the label and language
of the new urbanism. Other new urbanists believe that hybrids represent
a positive step forward from conventional suburban development.
Defining elements
The heart of new urbanism is in the design of neighborhoods, which can
be defined by 13 elements, according to town planners Andrés Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress for the
New Urbanism. An authentic neighborhood contains most of these elements:
1. The neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square
or a green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner. A transit
stop would be located at this center. 2. Most of the dwellings are within
a five-minute walk of the center, an average of roughly 2,000 feet.
3. There are a variety of dwelling types—usually houses, rowhouses and
apartments—so that younger and older people, singles and families, the
poor and the wealthy may find places to live. 4. At the edge of the
neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types
to supply the weekly needs of a household. 5. A small ancillary building
or garage apartment is permitted within the backyard of each house.
It may be used as a rental unit or place to work (for example, office
or craft workshop). 6. An elementary school is close enough so that
most children can walk from their home. 7. There are small playgrounds
accessible to every dwelling—not more than a tenth of a mile away. 8.
Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses
traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to
any destination. 9. The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by
rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable
for pedestrians and bicycles. 10. Buildings in the neighborhood center
are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.
11. Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is
relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys. 12.
Certain prominent sites at the termination of street vistas or in the
neighborhood center are reserved for civic buildings. These provide
sites for community meetings, education, and religious or cultural activities.
13. The neighborhood is organized to be self-governing. A formal association
debates and decides matters of maintenance, security, and physical change.
Taxation is the responsibility of the larger community.
Examples
Seaside, Florida, the first new urbanist town, began development in
1981 on 80 acres (324,000 m²) of Florida Panhandle coastline. Seaside
appeared on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly in 1988 when only a few
streets were completed, and it since became internationally famous for
its architecture and the quality of its streets and public spaces. Seaside
proved that developments that function like traditional resort towns
could be built in the postmodern era. Lots began selling for $15,000
in the early 1980s and, slightly over a decade later, lots prices had
escalated to about $200,000. Today, most lots sell for more than a million
dollars, and houses sometimes top $5 million. The town is now a tourist
mecca.
Seaside’s influence has less to do with its economic success than the
attractiveness and dynamism related to its physical form. Many developers
have visited Seaside and gone away determined to build something similar.
Since Seaside gained recognition, other new urban towns and neighborhoods
have been designed and are substantially built—including Legacy Town
Center in Plano, Texas; Haile Village Center in Gainesville, Florida;
Harbor Town in Memphis, Tennessee; Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland;
King Farm in Rockville, Maryland; Addison Circle in Addison, Texas;
Orenco Station in Hillsboro, Oregon; Mashpee Commons in Mashpee, Massachusetts;
The Cotton District in Starkville, Mississippi; Celebration and Avalon
Park in Orlando, Florida; Cherry Hill Village in Canton, Michigan, Baxter
Village (www.villageofbaxter.com) in Fort Mill, SC, and the redevelopment
of Stapleton International Airport in Denver, Colorado.
Designers are also using the principles of new urbanism to build major
new projects in cities and towns. In the mid-1990s, the U.S. Department
of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) adopted the principles of the
new urbanism in its multibillion dollar program to rebuild public housing
projects nationwide. New urbanists have planned and developed hundreds
of projects in infill locations. Most were driven by the private sector,
but many, including HUD projects, used public money. New urbanist projects
built in historic cities and towns includes Crawford Square in Pittsburgh,
City Place in West Palm Beach, Highlands Garden Village in Denver, Park
DuValle in Louisville, and Beerline B in Milwaukee.
The United States is by no means alone in the "new urbanism"
shift, (though it is important to note most of the fundamental ideas
stem from European urban design), the river city of Brisbane, Queensland,
Australia is also experimenting with small more commercialised developments
such as Emporium, (a living, shopping, dining mecca). As well as large
scale initiatives such as Kelvin Grove Urban Village, [1], a University/College,
medium and high resedential living with retail suiting all age groups
and budgets.
Congress for New Urbanism
Meanwhile, leaders in this design trend came together in 1993 to form
the Congress for the New Urbanism, based in Chicago. The founders are
Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Peter Calthorpe, Daniel Solomon,
Stefanos Polyzoides, and Elizabeth Moule, all practicing architects
and town planners. The Congress for the New Urbanism has since grown
to more than 2,000 members and is now the leading international organization
promoting new urbanist design principles.
Disney builds a town
In June of 1996, Disney unveiled its 5,000 acre (20 km²) town of Celebration,
near Orlando, Florida, and it has since eclipsed Seaside as the best-known
new urbanist community. In some respects, the new urbanism and Disney
have been uncomfortable bedfellows. While using designers and principles
closely associated with the new urbanism, Disney has shunned the label,
preferring to call Celebration simply a "town." Meanwhile,
the movement may have benefited from all of Celebration’s publicity—but
not without a price. Disney has come under attack for what some perceive
as heavy-handed rules and management. For those who would attack new
urbanism as insipid nostalgia, Disney is a fat target. The fact remains
that Celebration’s urban design is generally of high quality and by
most accounts serves residents very well.
In the 1991 book Edge City, author Joel Garreau wrote that Americans
have not built "a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in 75
years." Celebration was one of the first real estate projects to
break that trend, opening its downtown in October, 1996; Seaside's downtown
was still mostly unbuilt at the time. (It could be argued that Reston
Town Center, opened in 1990 near Garreau's home in Washington, D.C.,
could qualify.) Since then, scores of new urban projects have followed
suit with their own downtowns and mixed-use districts.
Criticisms
New urbanism is in part a reform movement and, as such, has drawn criticism
from all quarters of the political spectrum. Some members of right wing
view new urbanism as a collectivist plot designed to rob Americans of
their civil freedoms, property rights and free-flowing traffic. Some
members of the left wing view new urbanism as an example of capitalistic
excess, aligned with forces of greed that would purge the underclass
from urban areas for the benefit of the gentrifying elite. Some environmentalists
decry new urbanism as nothing more than conventional sprawl dressed
up with superficial stylistic cues, while NIMBY activists routinely
argue against new urbanism as being too dense, with too much mixed use
and around-the-clock activity.
Critics of new urbanism often accuse it of elevating aesthetics over
practicality, subordinating good city planning principles to urban design
dogma. Another charge is that the movement is grounded in nostalgia
for a period in American history that may never have existed. A related
charge is that the movement represents nothing truly new, as towns and
neighborhoods were built on similar principles in the U.S. until the
1920s. However, perhaps the most frequent criticism of the movement
is that some of the highest-profile projects—such as Celebration, Seaside,
and The Glen in Glenview, Illinois—represent a form of sprawl themselves,
in that they are built on what was previously open space. According
to New Urban News, new urbanist developments as a group are approximately
one-half infill and one-half greenfield land.
A stream of thought in sustainable development maintains that sustainabilty
is primarily based on the combination of high density and transit service.
To the extent that many new urbanist developments rely on automobile
transport and serve the detached single family housing market, critics
claim they fall short of being truly sustainable. However, a forthcoming
rating and certification scheme for neighborhood environmental design,
LEED-ND, should help to quantify the sustainability of New Urbanist
neighborhood design; it is being developed by a partnership between
the US Green Building Council, Natural Resources Defense Council, and
the Congress for the New Urbanism.
Beyond cursory levels, say critics, the provision for cultural and social
interchange in new urbanist towns is limited, and the permanent residential
populations of new urbanist resort communities are comparatively small
and culturally homogeneous. Critics claim that new urbanism is somewhat
incomplete: while providing a basic framework for the improvement of
the civic landscape, it does not entirely provide for the diversity
necessary for city success. Critics call into question whether or not
towns and cities are objects that can be "created," or whether
they are, in fact, the results of a process of cultural, social, political
and religious interaction that the new urbanists seek to accelerate
and simulate, in order to make their towns more palatable to their predominantly
affluent (and, some argue, nostalgic) clientele.
To date, new urbanists have captured only a few percent of the residential
market. The conventional suburban development retail model, particularly
the strip mall format, presents a formidable challenge to the new urbanist
ideal of walkable town centers. Critics charge that new urbanist developers
must get better at making their neighborhoods affordable, and prove
that their ideas are superior for both revitalizing and recovering old
cities, towns and building new communities.
