We've Had A Century Of Urban Experimentation, and It's Made Our Cities Worse

YOU MIGHT THINK we all realize that. But in Village Vices: The Contradiction of New Urbanism and Sustainability at DesignObserver.com an Australian planner argues that what we need is more experimentation.

There are so many assertions in this article - and in Lerup's comment on the article - that I disagree with that it's difficult to know where to begin. But let's start with an easy one: New Urbanism is not based on "the village." Related to this village-based characterization of New Urbanism (and despite Lerup's comment), New Urbanists are working in Port-au-Prince, and other places like Kingston, Jamaica, Karachi, Pakistan, Mumbai, India and Havana, Cuba. Here in America, Miami, Florida joined a growing list of towns and cities that have adopted a form based code.

To turn Durack's argument around, she is essentially saying "let's experiment on our cities," even though her profession has been doing that for more than half a century, with disastrous results (Ville Radieuse, urban removal, towers in the parking lot, massive urban freeways, Broadacre City, auto-based planning, etc.) Conversely, New Urbanism adopts *any* method or technique that works, valuing the successful making of cities over theory or ideology.

Durack's proposal is consistent with what architects, landscape architects and planners have been doing since the days of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus and CIAM. Those ego-based experiments have ruined cities around the world but have failed to produce a single successful city.

It's also consistent with what Lerup taught me many years ago, when I was a freshman in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Lerup was one of the teachers in the core program for first year students, a program which I left because I found the principles they taught so limited and constricting that I thought they made it impossible to make good places larger than the single building. In retrospect, I think I made the right decision in transferring to another school.

PS: Under the direction of Dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, one ofthe founding Board members of the Congress for New Urbanism, the University of Miami School of Architecture has worked with the Haitian government and Partners in Health to train Haitian urban designers in emergency recovery techniques and long term planning. Her husband and partner Andres Duany, another founding Board member of the CNU, has donated large amounts of pro bono time at their office for the creation of emergency housing for Haiti, with 1,000 units donated to the country. I don't know of any similar efforts by the Landscape Urbanism that Durack describes.

PPS - only for the hard core: Durack makes a number of comments I question. Here are a few:

I suspect, however, that the village and sustainability are inherently contradictory concepts. This suspicion is offered as a polemic, based on neither empirical data nor a comprehensive review of the literature. My purpose is to voice a renegade opinion on the merits of New Urbanism and its dubious claims to sustainability, and to draw attention to an altogether more sustainable alternative that has been explored in recent projects.

As she says, she offers no supporting evidence and "wants" to be a "renegade" voice - in other words, it seems, Landscape Urbanism's argument is flexibility and Landscape Urbanism opposes New Urbanism, so New Urbanism must be inflexible.

The problem is that it's another straw man.

It could be that the New Urbanist village is just another seductive, formal prototype that is successfully diverting our attention from the overwhelming challenges of exploding urbanization in a world whose limits we have only recently realized are tangible. Perhaps all this proselytizing about a “new urbanism” and its captivating fantasies of village life is just a way to avoid confronting planning and design issues we are not even sure how to think about, let alone resolve.

"It could be..." "Perhaps..." Sort of, "I don't like this, so I'm going to say whatever negative things pop into my mind..."?

Admittedly, we cannot accurately evaluate the impacts of New Urbanism until more communities have been built and occupied for a sufficient amount of time.

On the other hand, since many of the principles of New Urbanism come from what has worked, we can evaluate the models. Landscape urbanism proposes experimentation, so it is harder to evaluate.

My point is only that if we define sustainability as keeping options open and inviting our children to satisfy their own ambitions, within the same limits of consideration for the next generation, then the village as a model is antithetical to these objectives. And if we want to pay more than lip service to ideas of cultural diversity, environmental justice, freedom of expression, opportunity and democracy, then we have to embrace an open and indeterminate urbanity that allows these qualities to flower.

Climate change is an issue we have to deal with now. If we leave it to the next generation, they will be in dire straits.

Re democracy, the polis is the place where democracy was born and has always flourished. In places where we experimented with different forms - as in the Parisian banlieus, exurbia and the Modernist housing project - democracy suffered.