Readings for this week _ New Urbanism
Einat Manoff
I'm sorry for the delay in sending this around. All in all, the readings for
this week are as stated on the syllabus. The Harvey piece is short and can
be found online - see the link below. I've also attached a good critical
overview by Peter Marcuse, if you have the time -
For this week please read and comment on the following:
Talen, E & A. Duany. 2002. Transect Planning, JAPA, Volume 68, 3.
Review the website of the Congress for the New Urbanism www.cnu.org
Maccannell, D. 1999. New Urbanism and its Discontents. In Copjec & Sorkin
(Ed.) Giving ground: The Politics of Propinquity. New York and London:Verso.
Harvey, David. Winter/Spring 1997. The New Urbanism and the
Communitarian Trap. Harvard Design Magazine, 68.
[http://ruby.fgcu.edu/Courses/Twimberley/SustainCommunity/SustainableComm/ha
rvey.htm]
Suggested: Marcuse, Peter_The New Urbanism: The Dangers so Far (attached)
For this week - Please do your best to send your commentaries sooner rather
than later as I will be forwarding them to Andy who will be our guest.
I am feeling much better, thanks to all of you for your concern and looking
forward to your commentaries and to our discussion,
_Einat
William Cawthern
New Urbanism represents a new approach to crafting the design of the metropolitan region. “Transect Planning” by Duany and Talen gives an overview of what a New Urbanist perspective is like. Transect planning, in the words of Duany and Talen, calls for looking at the city and its physical context as a series of ecological settings, which coexist and which have within them systems and organisms coexisting as well. These environments have their own characteristics, but running along the transect from rural to urban they morph, one into the next. In transect planning, it is the planner’s job to design/arrange the environment of a particular area to create an “immersive environment”. That is, one that provides an experience that “is true to its locational character” (246). This sort of manipulation requires a Lynch-esque vision of exactly what the locational character is.
The vision often is seen as reverting back to a traditional sense of “community” that never was. Critics of New Urbanism like Maccannel and Marcuse argue that the movement operates solely on idealized conceptions of community and urbanity. Also New Urbanists deny that their school of thought is not environmental determinism, when in fact it certainly sounds like it. Perhaps the biggest criticism of it is that New Urbanist projects are somewhat true to their word of creating a dense suburb, but in doing so create a new ring of sprawl around the suburb. All in all, critics of New Urbanism see it as a hypocritical, idealistic approach to cities that want them transformed into Disney towns.
I definitely agree that New Urbanism has flaws, and the Disney-fication of suburbs into nodes of sprawl represents some ineffectiveness. At the same time, however, I think we should look at the criteria that Duany, Talen, and New Urbanism desire. Walkable urban areas, connecting communities with their latent soul, denser neighborhoods with a distinct civic center – these are principles that we all can get behind. The way that “Transect Planning” explains the transect approach is agreeable as well. Seeing metropolitan regions as working within an ecological context is vital, especially now with calls for more sustainable cities. The way that New Urbanism has been carried out, however, is a problem. With involvement in HOPE VI projects that kick out low-income occupants, and creating WASPy, artificial neighborhoods hasn’t been the best way for New Urbanism for make headway in planning. But as with any new movement, the conceptual foundation is there; the most difficult part is making it work in the real world.
bradley brashears
In 1993, the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) was founded as the leading organization, to promote walkable, mixed-use, and sustainable communities:
“As outlined in the preamble to our Charter, CNU advocates the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions. Rebuilding neighborhoods, cities, and regions is profoundly interdisciplinary. We believe that community, economics, environment, health and design need to be addressed simultaneously through urban design and planning. We stand for the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy” (CNU, Mission Statement).
Despite the positive goals and aspirations of the New Urbanist movement, opponents have criticized the movement as having created exclusive, white-majority, upper-class neighborhoods which thrive on nostalgia for the past that never even existed, creating a new kind of suburban sprawl. Peter Marcuse explores this reality by stating, “… [W]hat the New Urbanism has in fact produced thus far is a series of insulated, homogeneously middle and upper class communities, exclusionary in practice and gated in concept if not in fact walled, appealing to a nostalgia for a past never experienced, reflecting a fear of the urban rather than a new urbanism. It is not, thus far, an achievement to be proud of” (Marcuse, p.6). New Urbanism developments such as Celebration, Florida, much like a replica of Disneyworld, have created overdesigned, artificial environments that do little to address the real issues of equality, simply feeding the American predilection toward racial and class segregation. This is the biggest flaw of the New Urbanism which is so deeply embedded into the American fabric. Creating such homogenous environments has resulted in sterile, uniformed communities that lack the diversity and complexity of urban life. The implementation of New Urbanism has made it difficult for the concept to be readily accepted by many. While the goals of the New Urbanist movement are solid in their principle, the execution of these ideas has been poorly administered. This has resulted in segregation among race and income levels and the homogenization of suburban America to continue.
David Harvey argues the New Urbanist movement repeats the same “fallacy of the architectural and planning styles it criticizes”. Harvey explains that the appeal of the New Urbanism is vested in creating well designed communities that address social, economic, and political life. “The New Urbanism assembles much of its rhetorical and political power through a nostalgic appeal to ‘community’ as a panacea for our social and economic as well as our urban ills” (Harvey, p.2). However, this appeal of the New Urbanism has just recreated the problems of the past in creating homogenous communities that exclude based on racial and class differences. Many communities wall themselves off from surrounding communities due to the threat of social disorder, violence and class differences. Harvey further explains that this approach should be applied to housing the poor, who are the ones who need a sense of community the most. This would have to be applied to center cities in order to correct the problems of urban renewal that occurred within the last century. The New Urbanism, as Harvey explains, pays no mind to such racial and class struggles and states the New Urbanism “… builds an image of community and a rhetoric of place-based civic pride and consciousness for those who do not need it, while abandoning those that do to their ‘underclass’ fate” (Harvey, p.4).
While I support the guiding principles set forth by the CNU to create walkable, mixed-use and sustainable communities, I find it at the very least troubling that the New Urbanism does little in reality to address the issues of racial and class divide that have been engrained into the American fabric since World War II. It is my hope, as a future urban planner, to help reverse this American characteristic and help to foster social and political equality for all to participate. America has to move forward, keeping our lack of equality behind.
-Bradley
Simon Mertner Vind
Yuck!
I have just seen this youtube video of New Urbanism and I can’t help thinking that one of the fundamental reasons that Maccannel and Harvey oppose New Urbanism is because it’s simply bad taste. : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRrl7LwNUtw&noredirect=1
Look how ‘happy’ and ‘nice’ everybody and everything seem, especially the two white middleclass women (4.30) in the video who explains how fantastic their new ‘community’ is while drinking coffee and putting the baby to sleep: “People takes care of each other; the dogs, the kids – it’s amazing!”. YUCK!
I also love the New Urbanism Architects insulted reaction when he is confronted with the Gertrude Stein perspective “there is no there there”: “I don’t see how people can say that places that so many people live real lives, you know. Real lives with real jobs with real kids with real problems with real successes. The arrogance of saying they are not real places is astounding”.
A so called “real life”, according to the Architect, is apparently a homogenous, white middle class community (Harvey). Its very hard not to be arrogant…
Well, the bad taste I’m talking about is not just a question about aesthetic (all though I really mean that they’re almost raping the old styles that they claim they are inspired of). New Urbanism do, as Bradley also mention, encourage walk able communities – that is definitely a step in the right direction. But is it enough to call New Urbanism sustainable? Even though New Urbanism claims that the mix use – the inclusion of vary from urban core to rural preserve - is a progress compared to the energy perverted suburbs who dominates the housing landscape in the US.
In an energy perspective, maybe New Urbanism would be less bad taste if it would stop building houses in the rural reserve and the sub-urban zones? When/if the sustainable discourse becomes the dominant discourse – the climate crisis - my guess is that we’ve seen the last construction of the single family house and instead built as dense as in the Urban Core.
A last shrill comment from me is about the different kind of surveillance there seem to be in both suburbs and New Urbanism communities. The obvious one way of surveillance we see in the clip from “The Truman Show” where a satellite/camera is falling from the sky. It’s not unfair to compare video cameras to the actual window peeping that mothers from my suburbs used to do: “Have you seen the Postman recently, doesn’t he just look like he’s drinking more and more” . All things being equal: The big city is more anonymous – with its good and bad sides.
Another way of surveillance is the one you ‘create yourself’. Self-surveillance can be as effectual as actual surveillance simply because we “feel” watched. Foucault showed us this ‘power’ through analysis of the “Panopticon” which is way of designing prisons so that inmates never know if they are being watched by the guards or not.
Yeah, I agree with the critics of New Urbanism: It will reproduce the evils that it tried to improve and and it will exclude people with “inappropriate” behavior (non-white?). The only solution to the standardization of behavior through direct surveillance or self-regulating + the energy pervasion in the suburbs: Dense cities where you can disappear in the crowd…
Samuël Poisson
While watching Simon’s video, my first thought was wondering if I had been really arrogant from the beginning of my reading. The commentary sounds ridiculous to me: does that look like an old-fashioned city ? Who can believe that ? More accurate would be “it looks like a bad joke”, or a movie set. Beside, the fact is commonly acknowledged by the residents of Seaside since The Truman Show.
Beginning the readings with the article of David Harvey, without any knowledge on the movement, I had some trouble finding out why the new urbanism focused those critics. Trying to answer the issue of the soulless and conformity of suburbs could only be interesting, at least as an intention. One of the main critics that both Harvey and Maccannell addresses to new urbanism seems to be its enslavement to capitalism. Reading the Ahwahnee principles in Maccannell’s article, it seemed to me that some failed implementations were not sufficient to discredit such good intentions. Furthermore, the example of Dysney’s private “Celebration” sounded like a caricature of a town. The kind of place an author would chose in order to sound very critical and radical without to much effort. The demonstration works, of course, but seems disproportionate, as a simple depiction is enough to crush Celebration as a totalitarian project…
It was before understanding that all implementations of the New Urbanism carry the same disaster, and that people inside it have no idea of the consequences of the existence of their bubble on the rest of the world. Those projects deserve to be taken seriously and rigorously interpreted. They are build on a very efficient nostalgic tendency to idealize the small town, as a good old model. But let apart the fact that this model refers to an historical fiction (that try to erase 50 years of suburbian individualism), it abstracts itself from any context, working only on the scale of the small town. The argument that they contribute to save energy works only on their small perimeter : on a larger scale, they contribute to the sprawl (Marcuse).
This diversity of interpretation of a same principle shows what is happening with the whole new urbanism project, and let me understand my primary liking for it. They are very mainstream principle that seem to go in a sustainable direction. But the way they are mobilized makes of them the “mock cities” of which Duany says they are real. Taking the meaning of words for granted is a risk when we use them everyday. The context of urban planning does not break the rule. Building a suburb while pretending to build a dense or intense city is one of the result, claiming to « disavow the belief that shaping the built environment by itself will bring about community » and at the same time « We believe that design can solve a host of problems and that the design of the physical environment does influence behavior.“ (Ellizabeth Plater-Zyberk, quoted by Marcuse) is another one.
“They will never give up their freedom to sprawl”, is said by the end of the video (5’55). This is probably the main problem (that could be constraint, freedom or not, by a future peak oil crisis for example) ; but not a reason to keep building new suburbs, instead of trying to fix the failed ones.
To conclude, I had like to link the cheap philosophy of master planner Robert A.M. Stern : “I am convinced these controls are actually liberating to people. (…) Reglementation can release you” to something else. In The Grand Inquisitor, parable told in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, the inquisitor explains to Jesus that he has misjudged mankind and that the vast majority of humanity refuses the freedom that has been given to them…
Last thought : fortunately, there are the talking heads. Thanks Simon.
Le 22/10/11 16:31, Einat Manoff a écrit :
Tess Bath
This week I was seesawing between two perspectives – whether the New Urbanists’ plan was good in theory and poor in application (once corporately appropriated) or whether the “plan” wasn’t very good to begin with. Overall, I think my opinion lies with the latter, but while reading “Transect Planning” I found myself nodding my head in agreement with Duany and Talen a number of times (albeit skeptically). I found their attention to mixed transit, pedestrian priority, and holistic planning, stressing the interrelatedness of the city, commendable. They seemed to be aware of much of the critique of modernism, highlighting the fallacy of the nature/city dualism and citing authors such as Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch. However, as radical as some of their inspirations were, their solutions failed to carry that same spirit, reading flat and hollow.
Their plan seemed to be more of the same dressed up as something else – categorization and zoning with different criteria. While they recognized that they were working within the system, that might have been one of my major contentions – lack of imagination. Some of the rhetoric struck me as quite dangerous, with talk of the destabilizing of an area due to the introduction of “foreign elements.” As both Harvey and MacCannell demonstrate these ideas become much more complicated when we consider who is making the decisions of what and WHO belongs where and who doesn’t. At times I felt as though I was reading a dystopian novel, getting ready to plug in and tune out:
“Using TND principles that reflect an appropriate mixture and intensity of land use, each immersive environment of the transect is able to satisfy a different set of human needs and conditions.”
This language makes me feel as though I’m being prepared for an incubator. Both MacCannell and Harvey highlight the flaws of the New Urbanist vision. MacCannell uses the town of Celebration (in my home state) to tease out the inconsistencies of the corporate application of the communitarian agenda, while Harvey highlights its mistake in not recognizing the structural issues that perpetuate the lack of “community.”
Both of these critiques brought me back to our reading of “Underground and Overhead: Building the Analagous City” by Trevor Boddy, in which we are forced to ask if it is the thing or the image of the thing? Is it community or the commodified image of community, stripped of its original meaning? Harvey poses the question “Is collective memory being recaptured or invented?” Celebration founders attempted to create a backstory to provide a ‘fiction of unity’, thereby denying the ‘haunted’ quality of place (I loved the Certeau quote), attempting to white-wash and ahistoricize the town. This rings of the modernist agenda, no?
Cindy Borrero
‘New Urbanism’ and its Discontents
In ‘New Urbanism’ and its Discontents, Dean Maccannell talks about “New Urbanism” and the movement of providing a community of middle class an urban environment. He cites the town of Celebration in Florida as an example. This Disney town is described as and idyllic community with a sense of camaraderie and neighborhood friendliness.
In the town of Yosemite, city planners and architects came together and designed a plan for new urbanism which included 15 points. The points important for these new neighborhoods included short walking distances to places such as shops, schools, and playgrounds. Streets would have lots of trees and be pedestrian friendly and would decrease the need for cars and public transportation, encouraging walking.
In Celebration, there would be one-roomed schools, and every resident’s house would have the same design, so as not to encourage competition and disharmony among its residents. The front door of the homes you would be able to see the backyard of the home.
Maccannell points out that the show “Cops” provides an example of the diversity of the communities in America. This diversity serves a purpose for the officers, making it easier for them to distinguish different areas from one another. While not every house in the neighborhood is the same, they share lots of commonalities with the community.
The idea of New Urbanism paints a picture of a nice neighborhood, where everyone is of the same social and economic background and everyone gets along because they all have the same things. However, human nature doesn’t function that way. Everybody doesn’t always get along and behave in a “love they neighbor” way.
The New Urbanism: The Dangers so Far
In The New Urbanism: The Dangers So Far, the author Peter Marcuse, discusses what he perceives as problems that should be addressed with regards to new urbanism. The “New Urbanism” is basically a movement in neighborhood development that tries to go back to a time where communities were smaller, friendlier, and more traditionally oriented. Architects and communities come together to design an ideal neighborhood plan for its residents.
One of the problems Marcuse sees is with the idea of “new urbanism” itself. He feels that there was never an “old” one to go back to. He argues that the old urban setting didn’t really exist so how can you go back to something that was never there? It’s more of the “idea” of the old urban setting that this new urbanism is being built on.
Another problem is that of the new urbanism being mirrored on old urbanism, which is basically a minor version of suburbia. But unlike the suburbs, the urban community is diverse; a mix of all social, economic, and racial classes. In the suburbs, everyone is of the same economic and social background as well as the same race. If this is the basis for the new urbanism, the problem lies in diversity and urban areas generally having residents of lower incomes and minorities.
The new urbanism appears to be something great for residents, community, and the environment. But these problems have to be addressed in order to provide the best possible outcome for all involved. Marcuse, however, just posses the problems but doesn’t address a solution for them.
Juan Carlos Quiridumbay
In this article, we see that Dean M. States that the new urbanism
movement is to build great communities that pay attention at social,
physical, and economic life. It also gives a different side that this
movement has also marginalized different social groups (lower, middle,
and upper class). I believe that this continues today because we live
in a society that is based in social class. I also think that as show
in Simon’s video that we today experienced the division and social
class and who dominates the decision-making of a project, the upper-
class.
Dean M. also talks about the fact that we need more diversity in new
cities developments. One example he gives is “Cops,” in which shows
the diversity of a community, and also disapproves the idea of having
a great community where everyone is protected. This also ties into
Samon’s video, where the two ladies state being safe and everyone
takes care of each other in their community. I do not agree with this
because in our present society people have behave differently.
Also, I believe the problem that “New Urbanism” is that relays on the
past urbanism movement. However, Marcuse mentions that the old
urbanism never existed, it was just an idea, which dealt with having
small towns, where everyone socialize and protect themselves. I do
think that today, we should look at the past, but never design based
on this past urbanism methods because it would not work. I think that
if people want small towns, great home environments, and live among
the same racial background, they must be living in their bubble. There
is no such thing of having a community without diversity. We need
diversity!
On Oct 24, 7:01 pm, Cindy Borrero <cct81...@gmail.com> wrote:
> *‘New Urbanism’ and its Discontents*
>
> In *The New Urbanism: The Dangers So Far*, the author Peter
> >> set. Beside, the fact is commonly acknowledged by the residents of Seaside
>
> >> ** **
> >> Beginning the readings with the article of David Harvey, without any
> >> knowledge on the movement, I had some trouble finding out why the new
> >> urbanism focused those critics. Trying to answer the issue of the soulless
> >> and conformity of suburbs could only be interesting, at least as an
> >> intention. One of the main critics that both Harvey and Maccannell addresses
> >> to new urbanism seems to be its enslavement to capitalism. Reading the
> >> Ahwahnee principles in Maccannell’s article, it seemed to me that some
> >> failed implementations were not sufficient to discredit such good
> >> intentions. Furthermore, the example of Dysney’s private “Celebration”
> >> sounded like a caricature of a town. The kind of place an author would chose
> >> in order to sound very critical and radical without to much effort. The
> >> demonstration works, of course, but seems disproportionate, as a simple
> >> It was before understanding that all implementations of the New Urbanism
> >> carry the same disaster, and that people inside it have no idea of the
> >> consequences of the existence of their bubble on the rest of the world.
> >> Those projects deserve to be taken seriously and rigorously interpreted.
> >> They are build on a very efficient nostalgic tendency to idealize the small
> >> town, as a good old model. But let apart the fact that this model refers to
> >> an historical fiction (that try to erase 50 years of suburbian
> >> individualism), it abstracts itself from any context, working only on the
> >> scale of the small town. The argument that they contribute to save energy
> >> works only on their small perimeter : on a larger scale, they contribute to
> >> This diversity of interpretation of a same principle shows what is
> >> happening with the whole new urbanism project, and let me understand my
> >> primary liking for it. They are very mainstream principle that seem to go in
> >> a sustainable direction. But the way they are mobilized makes of them the
> >> “mock cities” of which Duany says they are real. Taking the meaning of words
> >> for granted is a risk when we use them everyday. The context of urban
> >> planning does not break the rule. Building a suburb while pretending to
> >> build a dense or intense city is one of the result, claiming to « disavow
> >> the belief that shaping the built environment by itself will bring about
> >> community » and at the same time « We believe that design can solve a host
> >> of problems and that the design of the physical environment does
> >> influence behavior.“ (Ellizabeth Plater-Zyberk, quoted by Marcuse) is
>
> >> ** **
> >> “They will never give up their freedom to sprawl”, is said by the end of
> >> the video (5’55). This is probably the main problem (that could be
> >> constraint, freedom or not, by a future peak oil crisis for example) ; but
> >> not a reason to keep building new suburbs, instead of trying to fix the
>
> ...
>
> read more »
Marc Pearce
especially, abounds of interesting references, all of which beg us to
be further developed.
If we go past the finer defining points of the New Urbanism and the
criticisms directed towards it, these readings have left me with
several broader issues in mind.
Starting off my readings, I couldn’t help but to feel very close to
the initial theoretical principles on which the New Urbanism is built
on and the general observations from which they stem.
The failures of suburban development, the emphasis on scale,
walkability, community, etc., these are all ideas present in today’s
main stream discourse and they are at the root of my personal urban
imagination.
And yet, when considering what the actual results of the new
urbanist’s principles have been, it is hard not to feel at least some
unease. For my part, after reading some of the New Urbanism’s critics
- and while bearing in mind the original thoughts behind it all - when
watching presentations of Celebration Florida, I simply felt pure
unequivocal horror. Horror because of what it is, but also horror
because of what it is meant to be.
These principles to which I nodded most of the way: here, where
twisted and somewhat corrupted. The ecological metaphor in particular
felt quite abusive. Although it stands as the leitmotiv throughout the
movement, it seems it is a profoundly misrepresented image. Somehow,
somewhere, someone forgot that an ecosystem is, before all else,
defined by the spontaneity of the life it holds and the specificities
of the relationships between its parts (in regard to other
ecosystems).
An ecosystem is not a prescriptive structure but a descriptive
construct. Wanting to see urban space as a fractal image, an infinite
repetition of its parts, it seems it would have been much more
appropriate to use an astrophysical metaphor, a much colder and
mechanical metaphor, one that represents scale as the repetition of
structure rather than a particular frame of expression.
The notion of Design held by the New Urbanism is one frustrated by the
descriptive nature of social sciences. The New Urbanism acts out this
frustration through a normative model that, rather than guiding our
efforts through theoretical modeling and empirical trial and error,
uses these models as an explicit solution to all ills.
But beyond this frustration, behind the New Urbanism’s approach, there
is the understanding that design has a unilateral relationship with
human affairs. Put differently, human activity is explicitly
determined by the condition in which it finds itself. Through my
travels, readings, and personal life it has been increasingly apparent
that society (amongst other things) is a much more dynamic system and
cannot be summarized in such a linear way. If anything, society finds
a way of working around design and form to fit its personal desires.
At least, the possibility of design being an action to which echoes a
retroactive response (another biological metaphor) should be
considered.
If design has an effect on social life and on urban (or not-so-urban)
space, it requires some return from its human cultural experiencing.
If the city is a “suspended symbolic order”, design becomes a
historical process. The New Urbanism denies design its historical
quality and by doing so endangers the potentialities of human cities
that they so eloquently defended.
Many parallels may be drawn from last week’s readings, especially
concerning our prescriptive relationship with nature.
Marc Pearce
I would like to share an example that I find interesting. I believe
this can illustrate how life sometimes finds a way. It contrasts with
a more nostalgic conception of ecosystems. It gives an interesting
example of how cities are not an anti-ecosystem but can be a specific
ecosystem in themselves.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/moscows-stray-dogs-evolving-greater-intelligence-wolf-characteristics-and-mastery-subway
Stray dogs in Moscow play an important part in the city’s pest
regulation. Their social structure has adapted to the circumstances in
which they find themselves. Where strong violent dogs would have been
pack leaders in the wild, in the city they are put down. Today the
smartest dog, the one that understands human “psychology” and the most
friendly or pitiful dog, this is the one that brings back the bacon
(...,letuce and tomato sandwich).
Here, rather than a context normatively defining an ecosystem, “life”
found a way to work around human design, it adapted to the
specificities of its environment.
This should remind us that ecolosystems aren't and never were static
fish bowls in wich
a set number of elements exist in set relationships to one another and
to it's hole.
Lea Dyrup
New Urbanism
This week readings about new urbanism, made me reflect upon different ways of approaching urban design. In the 20’Th century it seems like planners continently tried to develop new methods on how to approach techniques and tools in to solve the task: designing the perfect city. In our second class we saw how Le Corbusier and Ebenezer developed city models, which would solve problems such as unequal access to nature, overcrowded cities, too many cars and factories in the cities causing pollution and so forth. Soon a critique would arise, saying that their models wouldn’t leave space for impulsive social life - the people would have to live a life dictated by the structures of the city, not the other way around. Later rational planning became a solution to how problems in city planning could be solved; one result of many was advanced computer programs, which could calculate how big the roads should be, how many schools should be in the neighborhood and so forth. The critique was that the rational way of planning, didn’t took the fact that people had different needs into consideration. So rational planning lead to cities for the white middleclass, who owned a car, not doing anything to help the people who had the need.
This leads me to this weeks set of reading, because like other attempts in planning history Duany and Talen tries to find solutions (tools/design) in how to plan the perfect city. By seeing the consequences of urban sprawl they plan towards environments that should be walkable, pedestrian oriented, diverse and promoting of public space – New Urbanism. Their solution urban sprawl is designed cities. So we see cities growing out of nowhere in the 90’ies designed in every little aspect of their being.
But like other top-down designed city models and solutions in history, Maccannell criticizes new urbanism for being opposed to naturally occurring cultural variation. In fact he states, that all people living in these cities are homogenious. Also Harvey raises sharp critique of urbanism, saying these cities has an inherent placelesness and lack of authenticity. Seeing the youtube video Simon posted and the True Man Show I neither would like to live in a city like Seaside. On the other hand, in a normative perspective I think that the new urbanism has some good considerations concerning city life, for instance the mixed use of buildings and the walkable distances and promoting of public space – values which Jane Jacobs also appreciated. I think the lessons of these readings is, to have all these different city models in mind when planning, even though they don’t seem to succeed if they are fully implemented, they all contains ideas of the good city, that shouldn’t be forgotten.
Simon Mertner Vind
Samuel, the best thing about the video is definitely Talking Heads: ”TAKE A LOOK AT THESE HANDS” said the New Urbanism architect to impress the suburban architect. That was a Talking Heads – Urban Design joke. A funny joke? Not really, but I tried. Sorry.
A.Baruch Tauber
In Transect Planning (246) Duany and Talen compare the model of virtual “immerse environments” created by computer scientists to what transect planners do to test the feel and characters of different urban intensities. This is an interesting attempt to analyze relationships between design and us, but obviously the limitations of such a study are greater than a controlled virtual world. As D. and T. say “the translation of theory into practice has always been problematic for planning.” By attempting to have found a rigid model for fixing urbn ills the NU movement opened itself up to heavy criticism.
But is it just NU’s ideas that Maccannell is attacking, or is it all (private) development?
if it is the latter, how does this differ from homogeneity in government housing? On 116 he seems to be saying (though I may have misunderstood, i had difficulty with this passage) that before urban renewal these attempts at attaining social homogeneity had been countered by individuals beyond their front doors breaking the cycle of exclusive access through arriving unannounced at the “other”s door. I’m not sure how the NU developments hove changed this and or isolated individuals within a community any more than govnt housing.
Aside from Maccannell’s accusation of NU being racially motivated, I sense that NU is being blamed for not fully following through or providing immediate results in all their objectives such as having a true democratic role in one’s community, creating an authentic connection to the physical environment, and being flexible within its formula to allow for individual places to know what they truly need. These goals are obviously not being met as planned, yet Duany and Talen are clearly advocating for a Democratic and flexible process that results in authentic, sustainable communities. What is again preventing the “theory being translated into practice”?
I think it’s important to note that using urban ecology as a “new way to conceptualize the relationship between between natural and human habitats” is an important process, yet we must be careful to distinguish between the models and analogies that help us and that limit us. In the past eeing it as the model for how a city must function, eg. as an organism or body does has led to projects such as urban renewal, viewing slum clearance as the solution akin to a sick limb needed to be amputated.
<Abraham Baruch Tauber>
mqu...@hunter.cuny.edu
The school of New Urbanism seeks to conger up a representation of a healthy
functioning neighborhood by creating areas that are walkable, have a
discernable center, provide various housing options, conserve water and open
space and to de-emphasize the use of auto mobiles. These New Urbanist
notions arose out of the disillusionment with the post WWII suburb and has lead
to a significant movement toward these principles in creating communities.
Dean McCannell points out some flaws in New Urbanist logic and specifically
about its representation of “community.”
McCannell describes the communities similar to Celebration, Fl as turning
back the clock to a traditionally-inspired neighborhood that seeks to create new
social realities in an environment that is heavily controlled and regulated.
McCannell criticizes the paternally imposed “fiction of unity” that exists outside
of historical processes and social realities. Harvey is also skeptical of the spatial
determinism of the New Urbanist ideal as it, just as moderism, had sought to
contain all the fluid, endlessly complex occurances of urban social life through
strict, horrendously detail-oriented rules of lawn-to-shrubbery ratios and
drapery color. McCannell argues that the “paternal order” robs residents of the
capacity to negotiate with neighbors to establish a mode of behavior that is
suitable. The statistical communities as defined by McCannell do not lend
themselves to the naturally occuring cultural variations Celebration was
meticulosly crafted to
present a certain “image” of community, but what is “community” to them?
The principles of New Urbanismare not necessarily entirely flawed, as they
seek to incorporate elements of urban habitability into a suburban fabric. Yet
they are hijacked by the interests of capital and the imageneering of Disney.
Implementation of New Urbanism can make the quality of life of many
communities, not just lucrative planned communities, better. It is important to
consider what these principles seek to do and keep in mind the various
interpretations different role-players can draw away from it.
-Mario Quijano
Sara
The outright description of transect planning as a cross-section to
identify a sequence of environments reveals the narrowness of New
Urbanism. Its champions endeavor to resolve issues in the planning
profession, living and social conditions, as well as environmental
concerns through the defined set of principles. Premised on creating
“quality environments”, transect planning promotes design-oriented
solutions and fails to consider the existing social structures in a
community, or inhabited places at all. “The transect does not use
ecology to explain patterns of, for example, urban success and
invasion. Instead, the heuristic utility of the ecological analogy is
that it forms a design basis for integrating urban and natural
environments.” The spatial city is emphasized and the “ecosystem”
corrected (or properly established) by the production of ideal spaces
and institutions. The coordination of nature and human environments
found in New Urbanism inverts modernism schema, which intentionally
separated the street and pedestrian and planned green spaces.
Duany and his colleagues make a compelling case for New Urbanism by
advocating for the important of interdisciplinary engagement and by
offering a practical pitch for implementing their proposals, through
the adjustment of fundamental planning tools such as zoning. The
clarity of the approach is what led to corporate cooption in
Celebration, Florida. Disney exemplified the criticism of New Urbanism
as a mechanism for creating new, homogenous places that are
nonresponsive to existing urban centers. The broad ambition of the
founding New Urbanists did not translate through the actionable
proposals used in establishing Celebration.
While professing the scalability of New Urbanism principles, the
community, broadly defined, is the primary unit considered by
advocates and critics in the readings. Harvey adds a dark reality to
the community-level focus of the movement in claiming “‘Community’ has
ever been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance
bordering on overt social repression.” In Celebration, homogeneity of
the built environment and other conditions including the migration
necessary to populate the new community, limit socio-economic
diversity. MacCannell demonstrates that design solutions for all (eg.
panoptic houses) does not satisfy all residents. He, also demonstrates
a failure in the one-size-fits-all citizens method of planning.
Individuals negotiate among their neighbors and a gradation of
expectations of the environment emerges. These variations in the
relationship to the environment lead to the interstitial spaces for
emancipation identified by Harvey and recall Sorkin’s emphasis on
spaces for conflict (the unexpected) in urban settings, unaccounted
for in New Urbanism.
On Oct 24, 8:04 pm, Marc Pearce <pearce....@gmail.com> wrote:
> Also,
>
> I would like to share an example that I find interesting. I believe
> this can illustrate how life sometimes finds a way. It contrasts with
> a more nostalgic conception of ecosystems. It gives an interesting
> example of how cities are not an anti-ecosystem but can be a specific
> ecosystem in themselves.
>
dave ludwig
I love Harvey's point that new urbanism might be too "controlling" in
its attempt to re-create urban neighborhoods; that maybe they're
aren't all they're cracked up to be. Instead, they can be insular and
harmful to the vibrance of the larger city. He goes further, sort of
suggesting that we must shed the communitarian comfort of the
neighborhood and embrace an open, "super-neighborhood" where everyone
is equal and able to express themselves. No neighborhood equals
global neighborhood. While that idea is fun to think about, his more
important and insightful critque is that new urbanists miss the mark
on addressing the root causes of detrimental forces at work in cities.
"The problem is then to enlist in the struggle to advance a more
socially just, politically emancipatory, and ecologically sane mix of
spatio-temporal production processes rather than to acquiesce to those
imposed by uncontrolled capital accumulation, backed by class
privilege and gross inequalities of political-economic power." I
think this quote captures the sentiment that public and political
processes dictate the urban environment just as much as the physical
layout and that these two forces are joined in a dialectic.
Duany and Talen claim that professional specialization factionalizes
development stakeholders, making it harder for new urbanism ideals to
be implemented. More than specialization, I think the “growth
machine” run by power elites is to blame (again, Harvey's point).
Organized pursuit of the highest profit and biggest return on
investment will never yield the most beneficial outcomes in terms of
design for environment, community, etc. Nevertheless, they layout the
transect planning model on a regional level. It makes a lot of sense,
but seems rigid in its approach, “Everything in its proper place and
context”. Who's to say there couldn't be a benefit to finding urban
elements in a rural zone or vice versa.