American Enterprise Interviews Andres Duany

"He’s a Cuban émigré, a popular author and lecturer, a fearless popper of radical pretensions, and the flamboyant leader of an influential movement to return American community and home design to its pre-World War II golden age.Yale-educated architect Andres Duany presides over Miami’s DPZ design firm with his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the University of Miami architecture school. Over the last decade, they have built a school of Traditional Neighborhood Design (also known as New Urbanism) that now competes aggressively with modernism, post-modernism, radical environmentalism, and other ideologies for the hearts and minds of leading architects, planners, real estate developers, and local politicians." From the interview: "There are, for instance many, many places where what the town needs most desperately is what is now derisively called "gentrification." When I study most inner cities I see poverty mono-cultures. The arrival of some higher-income residents is exactly what they need, so it’s amazing that gentrification has become a negative term."

Thanks to Congress on New Urbanism