Artificial Neighborhoods Are No Substitute For Community
As new urbanist ideas begin to emerge in Calgary, a local columnist wonders whether New Urbanism promotes artifice over ideas that might actually work.
"One of New Urbanism’s leading thinkers, Leon Krier, was in Calgary last month to speak to the annual conference of the Canadian Institute of Planners. Krier is New Urbanism's attack dog -- its most vitriolic critic of, well, everything except his own ideas. Here are just a few of his choice phrases: "modernism is a form of radical brainwashing," "modernism is a totalitarian ideology..."
...The solutions the two groups arrived at could not be more different. For CIAM, it was the tower in the park with broad "efficient" streets between them. For the CNU, it’s narrow gridded streets lined with trees, front porches and picket fences. But both attempts are flawed in precisely the same way -- a bedrock belief that built form can heal wounded psyches and magically create that oh-so-elusive thing called "community" (in itself a highly problematic term)."
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Artifical Neighborhoods...
Mr. Ireton mentions the The Athens Charter of the Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) (1933)as an example of an earlier charter meant to help create "community". This charter represented a break with traditional urban practices by embracing an untested model of development; modernism.The CIAM charter proved to be disasterous as it's main purpose was to erase pedestrian urban life and replace it with "the tower in the park". It should be noted that "The New Charter of Athens" was created in 2003 by the European Council of Town Planners to correct the modernist assult on European cities by the earlier document.
This new charter is remarkably similar to the CNU's charter. Both call for a more human urban development pattern to replace the souless isolation of moderist planning philosophy. If the moderist philosphy was valid, there would not have been a revolt against it and a call to return to an authentic and time-tested urban form.
I would suggest that planning decisions are indeed moral decisions. They tell us what we value in our built environment; the isolationism of moderism or the community of the traditional.
New urbanism and community
Community is not built by developers, it's built or not built by people. Development can provide a more facilitative environment--better to walk in, to use transit in, to interact in. Land used more efficiently so there aren't great wastes to cross. Those are "new urbanist," really just plain urbanist goals. But the physical fallacy that certain housing forms will insure good social goals has been repeatedly debunked.
The answers lie in "The Nature of Order"
Christopher Alexander explains why New Urbanism fails to make real places because it does not use generative codes and also how making wholeness in the built environment is capable of healing us all
Adrift in fantasyland
The so-called "bedrock belief" is held only by second-rate journalists trying to score third-rate points against a fourth-rate fantasy of their own making.
Yawn...
...another article bashing Seaside...the strawman of NU.