Not that I am a “traditionalist,” personally, but that’s what you have

To me they read as ideological rantings that could be snatched up out of the context of planning and planted most anywhere. That doesn’t mean I do not find them interesting or important.

I am in a very theological conservative church working on what many would consider a very progressive social vision including a new urbanist community. I arrive there out of a conviction that ‘truth’ must be lived; it must exist in the context of love; or more explicitly in the context of a beloved community. A community must manifest truth in the face of the harshest human realities. Truth cannot be witnessed to or understood apart from its capacity to confront our most difficult communal challenges. It must be personal. It must be corporate.

The end is wisdom. The end is love. The end is truth manifested. The end is God’s well-being for all. God’s shalom. The end is design in which the garbage dumptsters express God’s glory.

The failure of an integration of new urbanist design with human-scale communal institutions is not solely a failure of the designers. I know quite a few mega-church sites that may someday make for great new urbanist communities birthed out of a different socio-theology.

tHANKS FOR ANY RESPONSE WITH SPECIFIC REFERENCES TO WHERE (AND ALSO HOW AND WHY IF POSSIBLE)THESE FAILURES OCCURRED….

jop

Limo Liberal Redoubts of Charming Gable Ended homes lining the well-appointed streetscape behind a LEED Sanctioned and Native Planted Gated Entrance is akin to hanging a Pine Tree Scent from ones toilet bowl in order to diminish the more extreme scents of the wider toilet.

One of the obvious benefits of most traditional or historic building is that it displays a reverence for craft….a recognition that labor is a source of poetry. Today, labor is a pejorative and in particular, for many of the well-heeled denizens of the gated New Urbanist community, labor is what they work to avoid. Comfort and luxury are wonderful things but when they become objects of cult-like devotion, their productive benefits wane.

I respect and enjoy much of what the New Urbanists do and say …even though I disagree that all modern architecture is bad…..some of it is very good…just not a lot of it like much of the produced effluvia of this witless age…..but if they expect that they can actually contribute to a way forward without jumping into larger economic and political circles….well, they will be sweetly playing checkers at a funeral wearing jodhpurs and drinking Pimms Cups. I hope their research of classical building techniques includes the art of windage because accuracy will be required to keep the marauding rubes away from such luxurious entrepot. Which might you select to plunder? A gated neighborhood of well-appointed obviously deluxe domicile or the average McMansion essay in Planned Obsolescence and Instant Squalor?

Kunstler is right in asserting that the New Urbanists are one of the only if not only organized force of thinkers and doers arguing the case against the Factory Drunk of the last several decades but if they really think they can prepare for another boom …well, best of luck .

Ben’s mention of churches perhaps exposes a blind spot in New Urbanism.

Weren’t many of the memorialized “walkable communities” of the past in fact religiously homogeneous or close to it? They were of an age when housing discrimination on religion and/or ethnicity was openly allowed.

Now you can’t even post “Catholic church and Buddhist temple within walking distance” on Craigslist. (Look up Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law Inc. v. Craigslist Inc.)

Secular urbandwellers will not have this “problem” to consider. Does this affect New Urbanist planning and its appeal?

Also, as someone focussed on local neighborhood community development,
I would like to see here or elsewhere the (exemplary? anecdotal?) evidence for the following statements, an apparent argument against urban planning of any kind, even that focussed on justice, sustainability, “pedestrian friendly” neighborhoods:

The right kind of physical fabric, beauty, a public realm and civic spaces that reflect and help serve the common good – these things are certainly important qualities among well-functioning communities, and by focusing on them the New Urbanists are doing something concrete toward helping to rebuild American civic life. But we have plenty of examples of places with these qualities where the thick bonds, existential richness, and mutual support networks of authentic community have failed to develop or have decayed.
Thanks for replies here or directly…
JOP

[...] People don’t like modern architecture (generally) because they don’t understand its language. Nor can this be solved merely by making the masses connoisseurs of modern architecture, Duany pointed out, because even within modernism … [...]…

I hope you had a good time in my home city this past weekend.

I think that one of the great lessosns for urban planners of any stripe must be the successful struggle to build the Church in Nowa Huta, Poland that was lead by Pope John Paul II, when he was he Archbishop of Kracow. Nowa Huta is more of a pilgrimage site that a workers paradise now.

Have the new urbanists learned this lesson? Do they know that community is dependent upon churches?

You note, quite rightly,

y worry about New Urbanism is that it involves the building of “country” cottages at Versailles for modern Marie Antoinettes. This is a worry based on the history of reformist urban planning schemes of a communitarian sort — the garden city movement for example — that ironically were one of the contributing factors to suburbanization and therefore to the same suburban sprawl that we are now trying to correct for via similar means to those which brought it about.

There’s a lot of sad truth in the history of the planning profession, perhaps none more troubling than the misguided-at-best, intentionally racist-at-worst urban renewal polices of the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies. The point about the morphing of the Garden City movement into modern suburbanization is quite trouble, but, as much as your fears are justified, I think it’s imperative that we not overlook the seemingly simple point that New Urbanism advocates building along traditional street grids and incorporating new developments and infill into existing neighborhoods. (I’m, of course, regrettably aware of the tendency of New Urbanists to engage in “new-town” development — e.g.Duany’s Seaside or the dreadful Kentlands —, but the presence of these, I think, doesn’t negate the generally applicable rule.) The combination of more traditional forms of architecture, a human scale, and walkability, I’ve come to believe after a few years of informal and formal study, sets New Urbanism apart from, miles ahead of, other trends — especially those that more quickly become popular in ways that NU really hasn’t yet — in planning.

It’s not, as you, other commenters, and Jeremy note, perfect. Jeremy’s point of decentralism is spot-on, if not slightly insufficient, in that he, quite understandably, doesn’t take on the servile state more strongly. That, of course, wasn’t the point of his post.

Risking portraying myself unflatteringly by using the comment box for shameless self-promotion, I direct you to two postings on my humble Weblog wherein I’ve delved a little more deeply into this. For New Urbanism to work, as I believe we need it to do, we need a Distributist–Anti-Federalist New Urbanism. With this Distributism, we need to incorporate a healthy dose of Georgism (or perhaps some sort of “neo-Georgism”?), because neo-traditionally designed neighborhoods, as popular as they are, will never be adequately affordable for the sort of organic communities we want them to become until property values and “the market” experience at least a partial divorce.

Part I: http://nathancontramundi.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/reviving-our-sense-of-place-our-priorities-of-localism-agrarianism-and-self-government-part-i/

Part II: http://nathancontramundi.wordpress.com/2009/03/08/reviving-our-sense-of-place-our-priorities-of-localism-agrarianism-and-self-government-part-i/

(And further ruminations related more or less to New Urbanism: http://nathancontramundi.wordpress.com/?s=New+Urbanism)

I agree with you that suburban sprawl-zones are not places conducive to the cultivation and perpetuation of the virtues. But I don’t see the advantage of environments that mimic — nostalgically — the sorts of environments in which the virtues were once cultivated and perpetuated *if* those environments are merely aesthetic simulacra of the physical architecture of virtuous community *without* the immaterial or spiritual or moral architecture of virtuous community within individual hearts. If it’s a fair criticism to make of, say, contemporary evangelical Christianity that it emphasizes the personal and the immediately interpersonal at the expense of the more broadly social, the more broadly political, the more broadly economic, then I think it’s also a fair criticism to make of something like New Urbanism that it emphasizes the more broadly social, the more broadly political, the more broadly economic sphere of urban planning over the immaterial or spiritual or moral architecture of individual *hearts.* The sorts of havens in a heartless world that New Urbanism seeks to provide are no havens at all if they themselves are as heartless as the rest of the world. While architecture and urban planning do have roles to play in the cultivation and the perpetuation of the virtues *even* in individual hearts, that role is not sufficient to such an end. My worry about New Urbanism is that it involves the building of “country” cottages at Versailles for modern Marie Antoinettes. This is a worry based on the history of reformist urban planning schemes of a communitarian sort — the garden city movement for example — that ironically were one of the contributing factors to suburbanization and therefore to the same suburban sprawl that we are now trying to correct for via similar means to those which brought it about. I suppose I’m just slightly more skeptical of social reformation in the absence of personal moral reformation than I am of personal moral reformation in the absence of social reformation, though, or course, ideally for *either* sort of reformation to be realized as fully as it could be, *both* would have to be pursued *at once* and, in fact, not seen as two separate pursuits. Just my two cents. Thanks for the reply.