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player ready...The Congress for the New Urbanism is a year-old group of prominent architects and planners with an ambitious agenda: They want to revolutionize the way towns, cities and suburbs are built.
After a flurry of success, glowing news accounts and accolades for its founding members, the CNU, by its own admission, is somewhat stuck in the mud.
“We’ve had enough show and tell,” Peter Calthorpe, the San Francisco architect who designed Laguna West in South Sacramento, griped at the group’s conference here in May. “We really need to concern ourselves now with coalition building and some type of charter for future action. When we sit down in small groups and really talk about what policies we can all endorse, we will get to a real productive stage.”
What’s all this got to do with you and me? Plenty, because the CNU’s aim is to have no less of an impact than the modernists who took over architecture in the last half century and completely altered the way we design where we live. If CNU is successful, the majority of new suburban communities will be designed differently.
Neighborhoods will be mixed and more dense. Schools, diverse housing choices, business, shopping and light industry will be physically connected. Streets will be narrower, friendlier to pedestrians, and we will be able to drive less and walk and ride bikes more. There will be alleys again. Garages will be off to the side or in the back so they won’t overwhelm our new houses and deaden the streets as they do now.
The CNU is modeled after C.I.A.M., the Congres International D’Architecture Moderne, a powerful group begun by European architects in 1928 to further the cause of modernism.
That group held sway for more than 30 years. Now, with the widespread acknowledgment that many of the modernist legacies-slick urban renewal projects, faceless suburban sprawl, freeways routed through downtowns-have done much harm, the CNU hopes to usher in a new day.
Calthorpe was one of the new Congress’ founders, along with the Miami husband-and-wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Los Angeles architects Elizabeth Moule and Stefanos Polyzoides, and San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon.
Duany, arguably the group’s spiritual leader, sees it this way:
“It has to do with generations. Architects used to work in movements. There were the classicists, the gothics and so forth. Then there was a generation of brilliant innovators-Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier and these guys became spectacular solo practitioners.
“Ever since, that is how architects have been modeling themselves,” he said.
The New Urbanists’ obsession, however, is the fabric and civility of the overall community. Most of them care less about creating unique masterpieces.
But most of the New Urbanists’ models have been flawed. Laguna West, Calif., has had economic troubles. Even one of the principal partners, Lexington Homes (not affiliated with Arlington Heights-based Lexington Homes), has thumbed its nose at some of the design concepts. The architecture is banal and the dense town center is still a fairly distant dream.
The famous Duany/Plater-Zyberk town on Florida’s Panhandle, Seaside, is a resort for the idle rich. Few people live there year-round. It’s hardly a real-world model because its developer, Robert Davis, inherited the land from his grandfather-with no debt-and didn’t face the usual development pressures.
Other projects have similar drawbacks. So what else is new? Real estate deals are flawed. What and who isn’t?
As planning models, though-and I’m talking here of how one assembles streets, buildings and public spaces to form true communities-Laguna West, Seaside and their ilk are light years ahead of the typical Planned Unit Development that has made every American suburb look like every other American suburb.
They are planning models worthy of emulating if America is going to recapture a sense of community and become more responsible about how we use land and other resources.
There are also detractors who think that compact, pedestrian-oriented development is a necessity. But these critics say the New Urbanists make the mistake of drawing their towns on green fields instead of working in the gaps in existing urban centers.
According to critics like Sacramento’s David Mogavero and Owen Byrd of the Greenbelt Alliance in Sacramento, there is little need to plow under more land.
“But they’re in the private sector and I’m in the public sector,” Byrd said. “They are doing the best private sector work around, but at the end of the day they need to work and they are doing the work of the developers who want to go out and build on new land.”
While Byrd has a point, the New Urbanists have done a lot to shift the planning debate in this country. Most planning firms now advocate more compact development and residential neighborhoods that incorporate at least some of the New Urbanists’ more salient concepts and principles.
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John Norquist, mayor of Milwaukee who attended the conference with his planning director, said the New Urbanists are closer to their goals than they realize.
“Cities and mayors all over the country are paying attention to this stuff, to issues of urban design,” said Norquist. “I don’t think people so much want sprawl as they haven’t really had many choices of late.”
Still, it’s as housing market analyst John Schleimer has said: The New Urbanists “need a home run,”-that one big project that illustrates all the principles and is embraced by the market. Some are on the drawing boards in several states.
Show and tell, where planners come and look at each other’s work-some built, some not-is useful. It may have run its course with this group, though, at least for a while. But this is a movement that has already left a mark on America even if its feet are a little muddy at the moment.