New Urbanism Kills Itself

Maybe Andres Duany is not such a tyrant. His heart opened and felt New Orleans as the glorious northern capital city of the Caribbean instead of the impoverished urban slum of North America. In February's Metropolis Magazine, he observed and followed his instinct to describe the relationship between mortgage free homeownership and the pattern of living - not the pattern of streets and building. The tyranny of the regulating plan and transect disappears into generations of self-taught carpenters, cooks and domino players.

In 2005, I made myself go hear the master at the Smart Growth Conference in Miami. I was surprised at the brilliance of his original expansion of Christopher Alexander's work by stealing the technique of ecological science, "the transect", for urban planning. I was dismayed at the insults he hurled at planners, architects and environmentalists. This is a not-so-brilliant technique, but seems to help win followers to the New Urbanist dogma.

If the artworld could stomach Jeff Koons while admiring his work, Duany and his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk deserve consideration. So last summer, I filled the Honda Element with three dollar gas and toured the DPZ works of Florida and their influences, minus Seaside.

In the Aesthetic Grounds visual essays, the trip is documented. A simple sets of repetitive patterns have emerged through implementation such as the 150 meter long "downtown", central canals with bridges, seas of parking lots behind every facade, cut-though passages, electric golf carts, three story apartment buildings, the allee of trees, etc. In better-designed communities, the streets are aesthetically pleasant. But in the newest profit driven densities, the internal streets are very mean.

New Urbanism as an intellectual exploration is dying through its implementation by the unimaginative and greedy. Like post war suburbs and office buildings that killed modernism, it will be implemented at an increasing pace until eighteen year olds are escaping the villages for those old, cool, single family 'burbs. Even later, imagine the Retro New Urbanism and Neo New Urbanism. No don't.

But New Urbanism has been successful in two ways. 1. For the human beings that don't want any control of or responsibility for their architecture and semi-private outdoor spaces and yet want suburbia, the villages are a superior model to the Florida gated single family communities with the same lack of individual empowerment.

2. Inventing New Urbanism led DPZ to design Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida in the late 1980s. Windsor is a village as a work of art and worth the visit. (You need to arrange in advance). Psychologically, it feels like a graveyard for the wealthy in the sense of late 19th century mini-city graveyards but without any individual creativity. Like those graveyards, the road pattern dominates the wandering experience. The distances seem just right before the next change like a small court with tree or the end of an allee of palms. The minor alterations like the jutting Leon Krier "church thing" or Scott Merrill's semi-circle pavilion become markers from a variety of vistas. Just enough change to keep you wandering pleasantly for 90 minutes. Just enough balance of familiar and surprise.

Back to New Orleans, Nicolai Ouroussoff in the NY Times is defending those mass produce modern communities. Unlike Duany, who released himself to feel the relationship between the pace of architecture and people, Ouroussoff wants to stop HUD from knocking down some government slums and recommends the dedication of high-end architects to the housing crisis in New Orleans. Instead of pleasant thoughts of generations of spices and handsaws, I think of generations of this tired modernist fantasy. If I did not crave pure creativity so much, Ouroussoff might cause me to join the tyrant Duany.

The Lafitte Housing Project scheduled for demolition. Photo by Fred Conrad, NY Times