New Urbanists, Perplexed, Respond To Mr. Carson

Due to the political nature of development, the challenge that NU developmnt presents to the status quo produces political opposition. Thus, most complaints about NU are merely political. The Old School is defending its practice and history from the New School principles which have evolved, like the mother of invention, out of necessity - the necessity to deal with REAL, car-related development problems.

When the Old Schoolers refuse to admit its failures, and unfairly assess NU, they should not be surprised when New Schoolers respond with charges of bias and dishonesty.

New Urbanism is still in its infancy, yet has a predictable future of decades of ground-breaking leadership, even while opponents disparage its principles and successes. Dear Old Urbanist dinosaurs, get over it.

Finally, New Urbanism can rightly take credit for the first truly 'new' urban planning principles of Regionalism.

NU, since its outset, has prescribed mixed-use development principles to enhance urban structure and create transportation choice. These principles have afforded many locales the opportunity to revitalize their economies and direct growth.

However, the mixed-use principles work on the (metropolitan area) regional level in a different sense; altering standard assumptions made for at least 100 years of modern city development.

While NU's mixed-use principles create "balance" at the district level, the balance must extended to the metropolitan area regional level.

In short, the application NU concepts at the regional level, (numerous, interconnected, mixed-use districts), will counteract NU's shortcomings, (gentrification, rising market values, etc), and increase practical opportunities to direct growth where most needed and logical. New Urbanism at the (metropolitan area) regional level is inevitable.

My biggest problem with New Urbanism is not its conceptual base, but rather that it is a distraction from the main planning challenge of these times; making older urban areas vibrant and active places.

I don't really have a strong opinion one way or the other about New Urbanism; I think that like a lot of planning ideas there are bits and pieces of it that are useful (eg. front porches, parking in the back, some attention to architectural details) and some that are dumb (the idea that architecture determines by itself whether a community is a good one, that if you don't agree with New Urbanism you need to be "educated".) But I do think that the conversation could be a lot more civil, and I generally find the New Urbanists are much more willing to criticize than to take criticism with an open mind.

I appreciated Carl Morgan's comments regarding the benefit of having one's ideas challenged. At the same time, I've often wondered over the last year or so where Mr. Carson is trying to lead his reader. There must be more to a viewpoint than degrading and ridiculing planners like me who strive to create communities based on new urbanist principles.

I look forward to Mr. Carson, Mr. Cote, and similarly oriented individuals presenting alternative solutions to the problems facing metropolitan regions today. If not human scaled walkable communities that mix uses and income groups, then what? New Urbanism will not completely displace conventional development, but it might just provide a sizable chunk of the population with an alternative way of living. It's simply disingenuous to say there is not a market for it.

I'd like to thank the authors of this op-ed for their response to Mr. Carson. In the local jurisdiction I work in (population 750,000), we're trying to introduce NU principles into our policies, regulations, and public education programs. It's complex, political and messy. The outcome is not guaranteed, but there are specific public policy objectives we hope to achieve by moving in this direction.

Dear M. Coté

As concerns insolence you might be too easily inclined to consider reasonable and well presented polemics as "insolence" insofar as they do not coincide with your personal views. Personally I was surprised by the rageful and inarticulate imprecations of some your anti-NU colleagues and found very little insolence in the reasonable pro-NU arguments, but again you might consider this as "hubris". Strangely enough you implicitely ask the editors of Planetizen to apply censorship rules to the submitted pro-NU comments and imply that that the debate has been lingering in relatively low grounds according to your excellent criterias of civility.

Please understand that I am not representative of anyone else than myself and that if I used to write "we" it was due to my adhesion to the ideals and goals of New Urbanism. By generalizing my "insolence" and "ignorance" to the whole of the NU practioners you do an insolence to many very dedicated and well-informed professionals.

Sofar I have not seen any NU design or NU built development which did insult its inhabitants and the existing built and natural environments, nor challenge in anyway standards of human dignity and comfort, and maybe these are the most powerful arguments after all.

Yours sincerely

Sulein Silet

It’s a shame that earnest planners have to respond to blowhards like Richard Carson whose only goal is to piss on other people’s good ideas. It can hardly be a coincidence that he presents none of his own. Carson’s “Urban Realism” is a synonym for “status quo,” and he should be honest and admit that he has nothing to bring to the table. Except for light rail, which NU advocates have been pushing back to the table for years.

Rowland and Mehaffy don’t chose to engage Carson’s points, which seems wise enough. But since when is zoning “social engineering”? Zoning changes earlier in the century helped create mass suburbanization by making it cheaper and easier for homeowners and, especially, developers. Was that “social engineering,” Mr. Carson? Hasn’t 30-odd years of gentrification indicated that many people do authentically prefer dense urban living, with no evidence of brainwashing by Commies?

Is it only cities where drive-by shootings take place? I recall a recent spate of killings in Maryland and Virginia that were tailored to the suburban use of public space. And “drive-bys” tend to hit people inside their houses in places like LA, one of the most suburbanized major cities. And please get a few facts straight. New Yorkers most certainly do want to live in Lower Manhattan. Even with subsidies (short-term and limited ones), Downtown housing is far more expensive than the city’s average. Yet it is now at over 95% occupancy. The people wringing their hands about ‘who would ever live Downtown again’ are people who are far away from it to begin with. Urbanites are apparently a little more resilient. And most people DO want smaller neotraditional houses, as every sales statistic on faux-towns like Seaside indicates. Per square foot, these towns are more expensive than McMansions on cul-de-sacs. I don’t like the cutesy picket fences any more than Carson does, but he is very close to lying in assuming that his aesthetic preference represents the average homebuyer. As to cost, it is common sense that as neotraditional becomes the norm, increased demand will turn it from a specialty item to standard production.

Carson’s manipulation of the worst tragedy in American memory to play on people’s fears, thus making his own case promoting the suburbs, is so disgusting I can hardly bear to speak about it. But I will remind him that two jetliners detroyed a sixteen acre corporate campus. How big does he want his campuses to be, then? (Big enough, I suspect, that you have to drive from one building to the rest.) How are you going to get the talent pool for each of these corporate campuses within an hour’s commute, if not by some form of “social engineering”? Will these low-rise buildings be any safer from bioterror? How about sniper attacks? Wouldn’t a simple car bomb easily take down a four-storey campus building, as one failed to do the WTC in 1993?

There are valid issues to be taken with the New Urbanism. Carson, unfortunately, fails to take them. All he knows how to do is piss.

Providing high capacity mass transit, like light rail, is a clean and efficient way to provide mobility to those who can’t either afford or access the automobile. Although light rail may cost more than buses, it says a lot about both the humanity of our society and the liveability we want.

Urban Realism will return us to embracing real citizen involvement. We will stop social engineering our cities and neighbourhoods. We will stop and listen to what citizens are really saying.

We will once again embrace the serenity of our back yards and the quiet backwater of the cul-de-sac. We will quit pretending that we live in the television hamlet where there never was a drive-by shooting.

We will want more personal space than public space. This will force us to rethink densities. These days even New Yorkers do not want to live in Lower Manhattan. Instead of rent control, such housing is now subsidized to attract New Yorkers back.

We will let people have the houses they want and can afford. Most people don’t want to live in cute little neo-traditional towns that look more like Disneyland’s Main Street than America’s Main Street.

Corporate America will move out of their inner-city corporate phallic symbols and back into the more academic-research suburban campuses with 4-6 storey mid-rise buildings. This will happen because corporate America needs to attract employees who want to be psychologically safe. Corporate America also needs it because a jet airliner cannot destroy an entire company – in a campus setting – in a single act of terrorism.

Down with New Urbanism! Who wants to live in a Truman Show-like world?

Diversity is the very point of New Urbanism as it offers many more choices of housing types and living arrangements than conventional suburbia. Inherent in this is the possibility of living a high quality life without the burden and expense of owning and maintaining a car for every man, woman, and child, which is hardly possible in suburbia. New Urbanism is also bringing back the possibility of small shops and mom-and-pop type businesses, again which is difficult in suburbia.

The real problem with conventional suburbia is that it creates social, economic, and environmental problems of epic proportions. Foremost among them are the fast spreading sprawl and the massive traffic jams across America, which together are degrading all our lives, and costing us many billions of dollars in waste and inefficiency. This is neither a sustainable or desirable way anyone really wants to live.

Andy Kunz

NewUrbanism.org

The New Urbanists have to be commended for having offered scientifically viable and historically tested, and contemporarily updated and perfectly operational alternatives to the modernist "hubris" of global suburbia, and the shallow, positivist scientism of modernist urbanism. There is nothing like religious fanatism in the reasonable and cultivated pragmatism of New Urbanists, and the objective and highly popular success of New Urban developments is not based on occult practices and sectarian proselytism, but on rational methodologies, common-sense, comprehensive and wholesome urbanistic design strategies involving the shared knowledge and experiences of professionals and citizens (through the practice of the Charrette), the definition of consistent typologies developed carefully from historical precedents, and innovative typological research, scientific principles, as relevant to traffic management, natural resources, construction systems, real estate, etc...What has "hubris" to do with this?

Are we insolently challenging the gods if we pretend that we can wisely learn from city-building principles which have been valid for thousands of years to build the most beautiful and comfortable cities in human history, cities, by the way, which are perfectly working in a contemporary situation? Is "hubris" not on the contrary the rejection of a historical culture of cities, and the arrogant assertion that the knowledge of the past is an obsolete luxury?

Now New Urbanism is certainly not a revivalism of "Good ole Towns" in a literal and historicist manner, but undoubtedly and demonstratedly a genuinly contemporary invention of American brand, a synthesis of a wide science and art of city-building from early first Mesopotamian cities to XXth century Garden-Cities and Ideal Cities, including the often under-estimated and magnificent heritage of American culture of cities (!), all based on similar urbanistic principles, but all of them offering an infinite potential of variety, of character and of local identity!

M. Robert Coté, rivaling with M. Carson in his trivial arguments, pretends that" The data for succesful built environments is available." Where can we find it?? If they are available and if they are not "time-tested principles of urban design", as M. Coté pretends, then they are logically "non-tested" and consequently non-demonstrable principles, unless M. Coté has at his hands the relativist sophisms, we are all too familiar with from some decades of unfulfilled promises of the modernist experimentalist utopias.

Sincerely

Sulein Silet

Pendulums swing to far extents and somehow they tend to rest in the middle. I appreciate hearing two sides of the story and find both ends of the specturm fascinating.

While I don't agree with many ideas of Mr. Carson, I do find that his questioning of the status quo tends to incite introspection of my own convictions not only to NU but other planning principles as well.

I think as the debate continues and NU grows, we are beginning to see the movement mature to a more Realistic New Urbanism.

WOW, what a surprise!!!

If we had a poll of Cardinals, what percentage do you think would agree that "God is dead?"

I am adding my own responses to Mr. Carson's article "Urban Realism". I am also a signatory to the New Urbanism response. Mr. Carson calls himself a planner but is really making a case against the planning profession. Yes, engineering, practicality, utility, cost cutting, security, public safety, etc. are very important concerns. But these are the concerns of other disciplines primarily, and only secondarily the concerns of planners. We need not advocate vigorously for these things. They are obvious and easy, and our fire chiefs and public works directors already do a good job. The role of the planner is something larger, more comprehensive, and more subtle. Hopefully, we are working to enhance the quality of life of citizens. If we are not doing that, then all we are is handmaidens to the fire chiefs, traffic engineers, and zoning ordinances which all too often embody no vision other than stipulating the required number of parking spaces.

Mr. Carson is correct that urban growth boundaries and transit are worthy concerns of planners but is that where it ends for him? If we don't educate ourselves on what is involved in creating quality settlements we will have a growth boundary with nothing but awful freeways and Burger Kings inside it. And if we don't create compact, mixed use neighborhoods the only way to get to the transit service will be to drive. And if we are only deferring to the "market", which all left alone will just continue to provide sprawl then what is our role? Mr. Carson may continue to be an apologist for sprawl but then what planning is he doing? We don't need him; all too many forces are serving up sprawl just fine on their own. The New Urbanists are the heroes I think. Yes, they are swimming against a tide but what a noble endeavor! And that tide is falling back as the New Urbanists make great progess. And time is on their side because the arguments are so compelling.

I have asked this of my planning colleagues before and have yet to get a satisfying response. As a planner, New Urbanism is my touchstone for how to plan, for creating a vision, for building better communities on a large scale and on the small scale we operate on every day (yes, it does inform my decisions regarding the 8 lot cul de sac subdivision). If New Urbanism (i.e. the acquired planning and townmaking wisdom of the ages) is not our touchstone as planners then what is?

Michael Behrendt, Rochester, NH

Great job on exposing Richard's proclamation about the death of New Urbanism for what it really is: a contrarian point of view designed to inflate Richard's sense of self importance in the planning world while bringing no new ideas or solutions to the table. His so called "urban realism" really is nothing more "than a muddled apologia for much of the same old postwar sprawl".

Perhaps instead we should refer to it as "urban surrealism" and use the recent WTC proposals as an example of this misguided design philosophy? The proposals, which have much in common with the dystopian future of science fiction writer Phillp K. Dick(i.e. Blade Runner, Minority Report, etc), are a perfect representation of the dysfunctional planning methodology that Mr. Carson endorses.