You used to hear about it all the time. In fact, there was a subdivision near where we used to live called Carpenter Village that was supposed to be this whole New Urbanist deal with housing and a central village square kind of thing with commercial properties. The houses got built. The village square is a largish expanse of nothingness. Seemed like a really good idea at the time. (I tried to find a picture of Carpenter Village’s desolate center online but all the shots seem to be from an angle to cleverly avoid pointing out that there’s nothing where the shops should be. Maybe I’ll run over and take one myself this weekend)

One of the things I wonder about is why there needs to be a New Urbanist movement when there’s an awful lot of Old Urban lying fallow. Not that I have any particular beef with the New Urbanists but it seems like if we focussed some of that energy on the urban areas that are already there and rehabilitated them it instead of coming up with some Disney version of what the urban environment should be it would save time, money, and resources. And that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it? I’ve talked about this before… everybody keeps forgetting about the total product life cycle. Yes, building in a sustainable fashion that encourages pedestrian activities instead of driving is admirable but new construction has an environmental impact. Especially when there is existing space that could be rehabbed. That said, there is some thoughtful insight offered in this post. Make sure your read the other post wherein direction by Master Control is also decried.

My other problem with the way New Urbanists work is that it’s all centrally managed and developed. Before the first bulldozer, there have been whole committees of people deciding that there will be single family residences here, and apartments here, right here we’ll have a coffee shop, and over in this corner…. People who know me, understand that I find this kind of centralization disconcerting at best. You know, like the old saying goes “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Nothing particularly wrong with camels but you never see one in somebody’s barn. As near as I can tell, that’s not the way old urban environments happened. Individuals decided what went where based on their needs. The problem, of course, is that this takes time because there are inevitably mistakes made in the decisions that individuals make. What I think somebody should try is laying out the basic infrastructure, ie streets, parks,  and then letting people have at it without any zoning restrictions. It would probably take a few years to get things sorted out and it couldn’t ever happen inside a city’s jurisdiction because the zoning wanks would have a cardiac because they know better than we do about what should go where. You can tell just by looking at your average suburban layout.

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