Fixing the suburbs is really important, but the suburbs aren't the city and shouldn't be mistaken for such

So it's arguable that Andres Duany is the man who fixed the city a la the headline and story in The Atlantic Magazine, "The Man Who Reinvented the City." From the article:

This year marks the 30th anniversary of New Urbanism, the school of town planning and architectural design that highlights walkability, self-contained communities, and dense neighborhoods. Hailed as the antithesis of--and answer to--suburban sprawl, car culture, and the megamall, New Urbanism has proven both influential and contentious. (Its flagship development, Seaside, Florida, served as the too-quaint-to-be-real set for The Truman Show.) But its innovations and ideologies continue to shape the post-industrial streetscape, from the Rustbelt to the Sunbelt.

I'm not saying that Andres isn't great. He is. I am impressed by his rigor, fervence, commitment, leadership, and ability to inspire.

But his most significant influence is on the suburban landscape, not the urban streetscape.

The headline of the story in The Atlantic ought to be "The man who is reinventing the suburbs." And note the word reinventing vs. reinvented. If you check out any major suburban county in the U.S., they are a long long way from being able to be called reinvented.

Rockville Pike, Montgomery County, Maryland. Photo from the Paula's Picture Window blog, and the entry "Rockville Pike is Always Changing, and Always Useful."

Maybe I quibble. Sprawl, car culture, and megamalls are suburban issues for the most part, except when people imprinted by the suburban land use development paradigm attempt to use and apply the same concepts to decidedly urban places, the center cities.

This problem I call intra-city sprawl and others have called it "inward suburbanization."

It's true that new urbanism has reinvigorated thinking about cities, and lots of planners have been reintroduced to urban concepts as a result of being exposed to New Urbanism, plus they have figured out what's wrong with cities (sometimes at least) when learning about the "transect" that links the appropriateness of built (urban) form to land use context.

This illustration from The House Book by Keith DuQuette illustrates the transect concept.

Is mixed use an exclusively "new urban" concept? Absolutely not.

Many people have contributed to the revitalization of urban concepts. And the work of many predate new urbanism, starting with Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, Jan Gehl in Europe, the Main Street revitalization approach, which was based on an effort in Corning, New York which started in the early 1960s, although the Main Street model wasn't tested until beginning in 1977, etc.

(Fred Kent of Project for Public Spaces calls new urbanism "new suburbanism.")