Reassessing New Urbanism

A thematic issue of the peer reviewed journal Urban Planning provides a framework for reassessing New Urbanism.

2 minute read

December 29, 2020, 6:00 AM PST

By James Brasuell @CasualBrasuell


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M.Fitzsimmons / Wikimedia Commons

The Urban Planning journal recently published an entire, thematic issue devoted to evaluating the project and results of New Urbanism. The entire issue is now available for open access. The full issue includes the following articles:

  • "New Urbanism: From Exception to Norm—The Evolution of a Global Movement," by Susan Moore and Dan Trudeau
  • "Does New Urbanism 'Just Show Up'? Deliberate Process and the Evolving Plan for Markham Centre," by Katherine Perrott
  • "New Urbanism and Contextual Relativity: Insights from Sweden," by Crystal Filep and Michelle Thompson-Fawcett
  • "New Urbanism as Urban Political Development: Racial Geographies of ‘Intercurrence’ across Greater Seattle," by Yonn Dierwechter
  • "Disparate Projects, Coherent Practices: Constructing New Urbanism through the Charter Awards," by Dan Trudeau
  • "New Urbanism in the New Urban Agenda: Threads of an Unfinished Reformation," by Michael W. Mehaffy and Tigran Haas
  • "New Urbanism: Past, Present, and Future," by Ajay Garde
  • "The Creeping Conformity—and Potential Risks—of Contemporary Urbanism," by Jill L. Grant

According to the introduction to the issue's theme by Susan Moore and Dan Trudeau, the collection "proposes an examination of New Urbanism as heterogeneous in practice, shaped through multiple contingent factors that spell variegated translations of core principles."

"The contributing authors investigate how variegated forms of New Urbanism emerge, interrogate why place-based contingencies lead to differentiation in practice, and explain why the movement continues to be represented as a universal phenomenon despite such on-the-ground complexities," according to Moore and Trudeau.

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