Reinforcing Southern California's Polycentricity Through New Suburbanism
A re-awakening of interest in walkable urban environments in suburban locations? This trend mostly revolves around the pre-war downtowns of small Southern California cities that grew into suburban bedroom communities in the 1950s and 1960s.
"The suburbs, long derided as cultural wastelands, are experiencing a renaissance...No longer just sprawling residential tracts fanning out from nominal downtowns, the reinvented suburbs of Pasadena, Fullerton, San Fernando, Burbank and Irvine -- to name a few -- are pedestrian-friendly villages featuring vintage architecture mixed with new designs, mom-and-pop stores next to national chains, plus jobs a lot closer to home. They have museums, theaters, art galleries, concert halls and restaurants."
"'New suburbanism,' as it's called, is putting vitality back into suburbia."
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Is This New Suburbanism or New Urbanism
This article quotes Joel Kotkin on the New Suburbanism, but then it describes developments that sound more like New Urbanism.
One of Kotkin's key points is that the New Suburbanism is "based overwhelmingly on automobiles for mobility." He says: "the zealous commitment to mass transit shared by many new urbanist planners and developers ... misses the essential reality of contemporary America." (Kotkin, "The New Suburbanism," pp. 17 and 18)
But this article concludes by quoting someone who lives in a supposedly New Suburbanist development in Pasadena who says: "I can walk to work, to the market, to movies, to every shop and restaurant in town, and I can hop on the Gold Line to get downtown. Sure, there's more traffic on these streets now, and some people here don't like it. But it doesn't bother me. I laugh at the traffic when I'm strolling through town. Those people should get out of their cars too."
Of course, Kotkin is wrong when he claims "many adherents of new urbanism are also fundamentally hostile to some of the basic aspects of suburban life, such as backyards and tracts of single-family houses." (Kotkin, "The New Suburbanism," p. 18) The New Urbanists are famous for designing communities made up primarily of single-family houses, and most of Kotkin's own ideas about New Suburbanist design are taken directly from the New Urbanists.
It is encouraging to hear about the communities described in this article -- if we just look at the facts about these communities and divorce them from Kotkin's New Surburanist rhetoric supporting sprawl and auto-dependency.
Charles Siegel