Buried in yesterday’s Boston Globe online in the City Desk for Cambridge was a little gem of an article that talked about a cat fight between new urbanists, a movement espousing more compact, walkable urban form, and a newcomer called landscape urbanism, who claim to be more ecologically sophisticated and environmentally conscious and suggest that new urbanists have it all wrong by promoting urban density and buildings in close proximity, ubiquitous paving, etc. While I want to summarize these two warring factions in a little more detail below, I will give a heads up that both movements do not seem to understand the limits to growth that will make each of their models quaint relics of the petroleum fueled industrial economy. More on that later.
New Urbanism, the two decade old urban design movement seeking to influence new development to conform to the principles of town making that have been so common prior to the era of the automobile, was founded in the late 1970’s by a team of architects from the University of Miami, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who helped found the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and a program for new urbanist design in the Architecture Department of the University of Miami. Largely on the energy, charm, and articulateness of Duany’s entertaining presentations, New Urbanism, it’s principles, and plethora of model communities from Seaside, FL to Kentlands, MD, have captured the imagination of architects, planners, developers, and homebuyers from coast to coast are are still going strong. Major principles of the new urbanist movement include restoration of major urban centers and the creation of new developments that have traditional centers in mind, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into more traditional neighborhoods and town centers, conservation of the natural environment, and preservation of the built legacy namely historic preservation. As a matter of disclosure, I am a member of the Congress for the New Urbanism.
In this Globe piece, the New Urbanists, meeting in New Orleans to discuss this rival faction, the so-called landscape urbanists whose movement began as part of the landscape architecture branch of the design tree, who has been known to feel like the red-headed stepchild of the physical design disciplines, perhaps for good reason. But now, LA has budded off (like the horticultural metaphor?) a sub-genre that claims that new urbanism is not the true torch-bearer for sustainable design. Landscape urbanism focuses more on living processes as the foundation for design and place-making. The natural landscape, according to LU’s, is the key aspect of urban planning. As a part of this foundation, LU is open to the possibility that the urban sprawl of suburban American could be more sustainable in principle than its urban cousin espoused by New Urbanists. At the Globe article suggests, “Americans have decided how they want to live, they argue, and the job of urban designers is to intelligently accommodate them while finding ways to protect the environment.”
Well no wonder New Urbanists are alarmed about the philosophy preached by this new faction. The accommodation of suburbia and its ideals by the landscape urbanists is enough to make New Urbanists, environmentalists, peak oilers, not to mention James Howard Kunstler, have a very upset stomach. This neophyte situated in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University must not be aware of the very toxicity of the suburban model from an energy, social, economic, and environmental perspective. Even the history of the suburban model should leave any inquirer with a queasy disposition as many dark paths were taken to erect the suburban model including corporate favoritism (i.e. General Motors and the Red Line), favorable tax policy that decimated the cities, favorable legislation, racism, and American exceptionalism that considered the world’s petroleum our very own reserves (see the Kenneth T. Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier for a good analysis of this history).
While ecological principles are seemingly a wonderful foundation for a sustainable model of settlement, the village and town center model favored by New Urbanists is also quite sustainable if not too large and surrounded by fertile agricultural lands where local food can be grown and transported reasonable distances. But what both models fail to acknowledge, and probably never will and retain any influence in the development community, is that growth as we know it must cease. It’s one thing to promote a form of urban design that can vie for market share in a market-based development system that we’re seeing the twilight of right now. It’s another thing to commit to end the philosophy of continual growth at the local level and anything beyond. It’s also much harder to realize that the future form of urban design will not even be called urban design but will be a series of natural placemaking acts that occur because no other alternative will be viable. This post-petroleum development scenario certainly favors the central place bias of New Urbanists but also could use a number of the ecological principles that landscape urbanism adheres to that could be emergent through permacultural principles as well.
But any urban design model must recognize the limits we will soon face through resource scarcity that will either make them a trail blazer for practical placemaking or a soon to be discarded relic of petro-exuberance. As local communities struggle with basic finances and still desperately seek the traditional commercial ratables to fund their bare coffers, the suburban model is alive and well with all but the most upscale or progressive community. The most practical role for urban design, architectural, and landscape architecture programs and practices is to consider a seismic shift from the kingmaker client to the middle American struggling small town who needs to prepare themselves for a more difficult future.
**Link to article, “Are cities the best place to live? Are suburbs OK? A fight grows in urban planning, with Harvard at the center”: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/01/30/green_buildi…
