New Urbanism and Urbanism

Regular MOJ readers know that I seem to have a tic that requires me to blog every few weeks about the "New Urbanism."  So, here I go again.  Here is a long, and very interesting, post, by (I think) a Notre Dame undergraduate and architecture student at the blog, "The Shrine of the Holy Whapping":

Urbanism is the study of city growth and city development, and New Urbanism is a philosophical and practical attempt to work out a way to bring back suburbanized America to a more classical European model. I was a fervent New Urbanist when I began school here, but of late I've developed a more nuanced, and to some degree, skeptical view of the theories in vogue in the Traditional Architecture community. . . .

I have, too.  Here is more:

I like the idea of the New Urbanism, I really do, but part of me wonders if it's too good to be true, a William Morris dream with a touch of self-destructive loveliness to it. Jolly Leon Krier's faintly morbid existentialist streak also puts me on guard as a Catholic; for him a church seems like just another piece of meaning-making urban furniture, less a place of prayer and liturgy than a vague symbol of transcendence on par or even less important than, say, the town hall, gymnasium or one of those (quite wonderful, yes) landmark towers he is so fascinated by. Most of the developments built according to its tenets have been too successful for their own good; only rich people live in Seaside, Florida, now; rather than bicycling to work they commute in for the weekend in their beach-house. And I don't begrudge them that, it's their money and their right to do with it as they wish. Without them, there would be no New Urbanism here, even in fragmentary form. But Seaside and such other communities can't be considered proper working models of the philosophy.

There's also the small fact people seem to like suburbia. I don't want to fall into the fallacy of simply dismissing it as the tastes of the booboisie but legislating life through urbanism and architecture--the massive worker hives of the Soviet Union, for instance--has a slightly collectivist edge which sits poorly on my stomach. I'm indifferent to suburbia myself, neither loving nor hating it, as I realize my own suburban experience is vastly different from the way other people grew up. I grew up in a quiet, forested neighborhood where they didn't cut down the trees and name streets after them, but kept them and let them grow, and in the early days sometimes we even saw deer bound through our yard. I wouldn't say it was an ideal, workable system as humane as Seaside is or ought to be, but it wasn't the soulless dystopia people like to make it out to be. We made it work.

The author goes on to discuss some of the possible barriers to the New Urbanism's success in the United States.  Check it out.

Rick