Why I can never be a new urbanist

In the spirit of Groucho Marx never being able to be happy anywhere, I am active on a couple new urbanist e-lists. I militantly refer to myself as an old urbanist committed to the repopulation and revitalization of the center cities, and I focus on the core, and on infill development mostly, when it comes to new urbanism.

So in a thread about cars, and the Scion being more urban friendly, I said it's still a car, still almost 13 feet long, etc. Who cares how it looks?

This was a line in response to one of my followups:

The New Urbanism is the old urbanism that accommodates the car. Sorry, it is.

Now I know why I can never be a new urbanist. Cities are about people. And in virtually all planning paradigms in the United States, the car isn't accommodated, but is in fact the dominating force in how land use is organized and enabled.

So when I call new urbanism and smart growth for the most part, "smarter sprawl," or how Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces calls it "new suburbanism," well, we're right.

So I'll stick with urbanism, urban design, placemaking, the walking city, pedestrians, and "sustainable land use and resource planning," as terms in my discourse, and not use the other ones.
Colorful, quaint and quirky Prospect is the brainchild of Kiki Wallace, who developed the community on what was once his family s 80-acre tree farm south of Longmont. (Denver Post / RJ Sangosti)


Index Keywords: urban-design-placemaking