When Growth Management Fails, Build New Towns

I agree and I have been working since 1947 around this subject. I moved to Israel in 1978 with the goal of making this idea a reality.

The Citi-state is not dying, at least not in Colorado. Overcrowding is not really a problem, and our "ghettos" are on the rebound.

The conventional urban form does predate the modern society and economy, in that it relies on the street network as a system to generate contact, commerce, and culture, as opposed to assigning these functions of society to things like telecommunications, power centers, and shopping malls. However, the conventional urban form of center, satellite; streets and density is becoming popular again for a simple reason, it provides a level of satisfaction for the user--contact with other people, diversity, and dense urban forms reward people. And compact growth keeps the countryside accessible. The city, not the town, generates culture, availability of consumable goodes, excitement, and knowledge, which is why the cities expand while the countryside depopulates.

A city's virtue is that it doesn't need a master plan-- because a master plan can never anticipate the things that a population of people will create and invent when they are left to their own devices. A city, then, is really a machine to create random contact between people and their environment, which causes creativity and copresence to create a common culture that is both diverse and predictable.

We are finally becoming sophisticated enough to appreciate what we have had all along.

Wow - I sure that fanciful notions of experimental, perfect, bucolic towns, not to mention the most extreme forms of top-down planning of the kind proposed by Mr. Carson were long, long dead . . . what is going here? I also thought the anti-sprawl movement was guided, or aligned with the principle that YOU CAN NOT FOREVER RUN AWAY FROM YOUR PROBLEMS. I hope Carson's opinions are not that popular with other planning professionals . . . please, no more future cities until you fix what we have, or at least show me a completely planned city that actually worked.

Jonathan Swift, author and satirist, argues in "A Modest Proposal" (1729). that the Irish should eat their own children, as a drastic (although humorous and sarcastic) response to problems of overpopulation, economic distress, and famine in Ireland.

Mr. Carson is doing the same thing here. He's provided a tongue-in-cheek argument. We all know perfectly well that we will never abandon our cities to create new town. In fact, many of Planetizen's readers have provided a variety of excellent reasons why this isn't even particularly desirable.

Let's be honest: most seasoned planners have at one time or another fantasized about just starting over with a clean slate, where they can organize, zone, and plan the built environment as they would really like it to be -- absent of political bickering and overzealous citizen activists. A Sim-City for real.

Mr. Carson is an experienced and jaded urban planner. He's reflecting the feelings of many planners -- and making us think about our own assumptions.

Sure it's a little disengenuous, but it made us all think about it, discuss it, and lift the level of debate. It's useful to have "straw men" arguments like this.

At the same time, Mr. Carson proposes several characteristics for his vision of the utopian town. They aren't mine, necessarily, but they did make me wonder what mine would be -- and what I can do to make them more real in my own city.

It's odd that Mr Carson hails from Portland, but exhibits little understanding of or confidence in its 2040 Regional Plan. Regionalism seems to be the wave of the future. And, of course, that bold statment cannot be made without some elaboration. What is Regionalism?

Regionalism is NOT giving up & moving elsewhere, as if this is possible, practical or desireable. Portland's Regional Plan looks 50 years ahead at metropolitan development with rose-coloured glasses, refusing to admit defeat in the lengthy process of building a better future, naysayers & ne'er-do-wells, notwithstanding.

The Regional Citi-state is the obvious course of developmental evolvement. We cannot nor need we pull up roots & build over, (mass popultation scale). Most infrastructural problems of traffic & population congestion can be ameliorated through "dispersal" of new development, according to the New Urbanist basic tenet of "Mixed-use".

Within every metropolitan area, there exists a thousand districts of single-purpose developments, (ALL housing or ALL employment, or ALL commercial retail, or ALL industrial). And, the unbearable transportation demand between these districts can be fundamentally reduced by development that compliments or diversifies their basic lack of uses, using existing infrastructure to complete the imbalanced nature of development.

Carson's statement that future transit will be inter-city as opposed to intra-city does NOT follow New Urbanist theories of mixed-use. Expecting people to commute in that fashion is absolutely ridiculous just as it is riduclous today. Regionalism creates jobs within a region so that jobless suburbanites have less need to commute.

I recognize his "build over" sentiment as pure Utopianism, perhaps affected by development-for-development's sake interests, but to my mind, we are living in Utopia, unrestored. Utopia is not elsewhere.

Come on everybody, Rich Carson is just pulling your leg. He's a libertarian who believes that the great mythical "market" is all you need to create beautiful placfes.

And he's right. I mean, look at how beautiful American cities built under 20th century capitalism are when compared to those communistic Europeans. I would take an American strip commercial zone to any European square-I mean you have to get out of your car and walk in Europe. Horrors!

Mr. Carson, you've gone way too far with your article. Are you suggesting that Paris, New York, Chicago, and other sublime cities be bulldozed in favour of building new towns? Certainly, there are many more people than a few intelectuals and tourists who would not want to see them go. Despite problems with urban decay and poverty, these cities are vibrant and exciting places to visit and live because of their cultural diversity and abundant urban amenities. It's just that one needs to make tradeoffs in a larger centre(congestion, for example), tradeoffs which many gladly accept.

Concerning your example of Austin, Texas as an example of new town development, do you really think it qualifies as a new town? It is an established city that was once sleepy until it revitalized what it had and attracted a lot of high tech companies. You are thus confusing revitalization with new town building.

You're idea for new towns is not new, in fact Alberta (Canada) built new resource-based towns in the 1960's. Today, these towns have hardly grown. Large corporations and talented employees flock to where the established cities are, with their numerous urban amenities and cultural diversity. Why do you think that it is so hard to attract good doctors, architects, computer engineers, or even planners, to smaller, less established communities?

That's all very well but who is going to mandate that? Will we say that you may not move to a city that has reached its capacity? Would that pass constitutional muster?