New Urbanism

History

Well before they coined new urbanism, new urban-ists had built several communities and had started several initiatives. Beginning in the 1970s, designers and critics in the United States and Europe, including Leon Krier, Christopher Alexander, Robert Stern, Colin Rowe, Vincent Scully, Jacqueline Robertson, Gordon Cullen and others, called attention to enduring urban design and architectural principles. Especially in the United States, they sought to continue the traditions of the Garden City movement, the Anglo-American suburb, and the City Beautiful movement. Seaside, Florida, the first community generally recognized as new urban-ist, broke ground in 1981. It was designed by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company with developer Robert Davis. While we may consider much of the work of these practitioners to be postmodern, Seaside was a resort community that appealed to a broad sector of the public. RTKL's State-Thomas project in Dallas, Texas, built in 1985, and the IBA competitions for rebuilding Berlin in 1979, 1984, and 1987 reintroduced traditional mixed-use projects into urban settings. The renovation of the Diggs Town public housing in Norfolk, Virginia, by Urban Design Associates in 1990 gave residents clear, socially legible porches and front doors—a tangible benefit of traditional design.

In 1988, His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, with Leon Krier, started planning a new village called Poundbury in the Duchy of Cornwall in the United Kingdom. Since its groundbreaking in 1993, it has grown incrementally and arguably has the most successful mix of incomes and uses —including workplaces—of any new urbanist development. Kentlands, Celebration, and other developments of the late 1980s and early 1990s were among the first new urbanist developments to compete directly with suburban subdivisions. These traditional neighborhood developments include neighborhoods and town centers. One, Laguna West near Sacramento, California, designed by Calthorpe Associates, broke ground in 1989. It mixed conventional suburban practices with new urbanist ones and provoked discussion about the need for a common language and principles.

The new urbanism's peer review process has depended on a common terminology. New and recovered terms have helped it develop ideas with a consistency unusual in planning movements. One such early term, pedestrian pocket, coined by Peter Calthorpe, denoted a compact urban center around a rail transit stop. A collaborative competition among designers published its results in The Pedestrian Pocket Book: A New Suburban Strategy, edited by Douglas Kelbaugh and published in 1988. It solidified the meaning of the term, popularized it, and used it to illustrate appropriate development around transit. Since 1998, Andres Duany, in both the unpublished but circulated book The Lexicon of the New Urbanism and the SmartCode has insisted on consistent terminology to promote new and recovered ideas.

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