Raining on the New Urbanist parade: Why the Romantic school of urban design is dangerous

Of some of the more popular projects in mixed-use development, I’m seeing a disturbing distinction: transience vs. permanence in housing. This is a smaller subset of the larger New Urbanist program that tries to reproduce the structures of the functioning city – only all of a piece. The question is: do they reproduce the deep structure, or only its superficial appearance?

Permanence, for good or ill, seems to depend on the presence of children; family is probably the most popular reason to stay in the same place for different stages of one’s life. Permanence means consistent, predictable demand. Long-term investment depends on consistent, predictable demand. Homogenous, transient groups result in a “trendiness” phenomenon, as those that can live wherever they wish move to the most desirable location at the moment. Long-term investment with deep stakeholders results in durability, as the lure of somewhere else is mollified by commitments made to where you’ve sunk roots. Community adjustment depends on overlapping development, as the old and less-than-successful is supplanted by the new and unanticipated. Overlapping development requires long time-horizons to anticipate need shifts. Without diverse economic activity and deep stakeholding, demand activity can be catastrophically affected by a single period or occurrence: a crime event, the loss of a single local employer, newer housing across the city. If demand activity falls apart suddenly, the positive character of the area evaporates overnight as vacancy and abandonment replaces liveliness and watchfulness.


Once again, the question to ask is what is the time horizon of the developer? Will there be this adjusting, refining second and third-stage neighborhood development, or is the initial project all that there will be? An area with no buy-in, no fixed commitments, runs the risk of becoming a ready-made ghetto if its economic reason for being disappears. If the only good reason it can muster is transient popularity – watch out. Near the end of her life Jane Jacobs wrote a book called The Nature of Economies, which basically postulates that the health of an economy of whatever size depends on overlap and diversity – metaphorically compared with mature forest growth. My fear is that the Atlantic Yards and Mockingbird Stations of the world are monocultures; and when their single crop suffers a setback they’ll meet erosion and famine. Beware the demographers! In projects with construction methods (I’m thinking specifically of EIFS) that have a life-cycle of less than twenty years, the danger is heightened substantially.

Tell-tales of the healthy neighborhood: Child care. Pharmacies. General grocery. Schools. Professional offices (accounting, optometry, chiropractry, dentistry, etc.) Things that are unglamorous generally.

Why has no one written this book?

[For both real and fake versions of the American town – see Matt Minnix - World Traveler’s photos to the left]