Religious Pluralism: The Problem with New Urbanism

By now everyone should be fully steeped in the Katz / Duany-Plyter-Zyberk theory of New Urbanism. As a refresher: cities (qua neighborhoods) should be built as unified entities that emphasize the pedestrian way, promote interactions between neighbors, and locate services at a density and distribution where people can meet most of their daily needs on foot. I, personally, think this is a great idea. I’m also pretty sure that even if built it will rather quickly unbuild itself. Architecturally, I think the lights of NU are dead on. It’s their economics that I have a problem with.

Back in design school, my equally theoretical roommate came across The Church Problem in a Harvard Design Journal. It runs like this:
Let’s say that we’ve done the right thing and built neighborhoods that distribute services throughout neighborhoods evenly. There are no large concentrations of shopping, or offices, or any of the parking-lot seas of blight that long-distance personal transportation tends to bring about. Each entity is sized to serve a catchment area of those who (at a relatively high housing density) live a reasonable walking distance away. Think pre-auto France, or the older parts of Chicago. The idea seems to work, much like both of those places, as long as everyone’s Catholic (or Anglican, or what have you.) Otherwise you have three choices: 1) Concentrate every necessary religious sect in every neighborhood, ramping up staffing levels and church-to-everything-else ratios to something never before seen. 2) Concentrate the various religions into their own ghettos – the Muslim ghetto, the Ba’hai ghetto, etc. (Which, of course, is what traditionally happened.) 3) Pull that part of life off of the grid and make it either a very long transit ride, or the one thing you need a car for. Thus The Church Problem.

Beyond the issue of segregation, this highlights one of the big reasons that folks left traditional urbanism in the first place: Choice. Stretching beyond Sabbath Services, how can the hyper-efficient form of capitalist competition work if you can’t reasonably leave a business and go somewhere else? Would modern Americans be satisfied with the option of one supermarket? What if you’re the only one in the neighborhood willing to pay for Camembert – or worse the only one not able to pay a premium for things? [see food below] I’m not saying that assortment and limitation don’t happen in hyper-distant auto cities, but this is a problem that I have yet to see the New Urbanist advocates adequately address. Choice.

If we limit our transportation, how do we not limit our choice, and how willing would the average person be to give some of that up?

Coda: Choice without high-speed transportation is possible, but usually at Manhattan densities. That kind of city isn’t even under discussion, and certainly not built from scratch.