Won't you be my neighbor?

'New Urbanism' takes neighborhoods back to the future

By Andy Walton
CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- In the late 1940s, a builder named William Levitt started a revolution in a Long Island potato field. Levitt built 2,000 simple, identical houses for returning GIs in the midst of a nationwide housing crisis. Levittown, as the development became known, was the first emblem of a new American lifestyle -- suburbanism.

For decades, suburban lifestyle was synonymous with the American Dream. Ward and June Cleaver and Ozzy and Harriet Nelson were TV icons for the millions of families who moved to the suburbs to own their own houses, with lawns and driveways and supermarkets, but precious few sidewalks.

Today, a new architectural and city planning movement is looking to replace the suburban house-car-strip mall model. The philosophy behind "the New Urbanism" is that communities should be built around mixed-use neighborhoods, with housing, jobs, stores and services within walking distance. New Urbanism, sometimes called neo-traditionalism, looks to the urban neighborhoods and small towns that existed before World War II as a model for the future.

"It's really about restoring the idea of the neighborhood, the town and the city as the places where people can be happiest living, and can be most economically fruitful," says Jim Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere" and "Home from Nowhere."

'Places not worth caring about'

New Urbanist planners complain that zoning laws actually force neighborhoods to become hostile to pedestrians by separating commercial and residential space and mandating that stores and businesses are set back from the street behind vast parking lots. Zoning and development patterns have divided upper-, middle-, and lower-income residents into separate enclaves, some of them behind locked gates, all of them far from shopping and work, and all reliant on driving on overcrowded major streets to do just about anything.

As an alternative, New Urbanists propose small, self-contained neighborhoods with a clearly-defined center and edges. In each neighborhood, the center is no more than a quarter of a mile from the edge -- a reasonable walking distance. In a New Urban neighborhood, streets are places in their own right, not just a void between places. Multi-story buildings close to wide sidewalks create an "urban wall," and landscaping and street lights are "on a human scale," built around pedestrians rather than cars. Parking lots are behind buildings, accessible by alleys.

In Seaside, Florida, an early experiment in New Urbanism, stringent planning codes require that every house have a front porch at least eight feet deep and half the width of the house. The porch is usually 16 feet from the sidewalk. Neighborhood streets are paved with bricks to encourage motorists to slow down. The "town" -- actually an unincorporated area along the Gulf Coast -- began in 1981 as an attempt to recapture the character of old-fashioned resort towns. At least in outward appearances, it has succeeded; the scenes of an idyllic but artificial town in "The Truman Show" were filmed in Seaside.

Another Florida development, which has drawn heated criticism, is Celebration, just outside Orlando and adjacent to Walt Disney World. Celebration was built by Disney, and a Disney subsidiary remains active in enforcing the community's rules. Among them: All window treatments must be white or off-white. More than two people cannot share a bedroom. And if neighbors complain about a noisy pet, it can be evicted from Celebration with or without the owner's consent. Even some New Urbanist planners criticize Celebration, saying that its multi-car garages don't discourage driving, and its lack of churches, a supermarket or a laundromat make driving mandatory.

Suburban 'implosion'

Seaside, Celebration and other high-profile New Urbanist developments built thus far have been vacation getaways or havens for the affluent. But Kunstler argues that the New Urbanist model for living is not only preferable, but will be made inevitable by economic pressures, beginning with rising and unstable oil prices.

"We do not have to run out of oil to badly disable much of suburban America," Kunstler says. "All we have to do is be subject to markets that are mildly to moderately unstable, and we are going to see tremendous problems in suburban America.

"There is going to be such an implosion of suburban property values that it is going to make people's heads spin," Kunstler predicts. "I think the reality of the situation is that the suburbs are going to become the slums of tomorrow ... Some of them will be the ruins of tomorrow."

Peter Gordon, a professor at the University of Southern California's Graduate School of Policy, Planning and Development, rejects that claim. "This Doomsday stuff is always wrong," he says. "People who are ignorant of the previous track record of Doomsday forecasts blithely go on making them, which is fine. But it's when they prescribe harsh measures for the rest of us to live by that we ought to take serious notice."

Gordon says the New Urbanist model of living has one crucial flaw: People actually like suburbs.

"What I define as a livable city is where real people are choosing to go. That's the only way I can define it," Gordon says. "That may not jibe with the image of what's livable to certain writers, but ... it's the preferences of the people that ought to count in some calculus somewhere."

"The argument that people like driving around in their SUVs and living in pod subdivisions is really beside the point," Kunstler says. "People also like shooting heroin. People also like drinking too much. People like eating more fatty food than is good for them. There are a lot of things that people like that the world does not necessarily reward them for."

Dancing about architecture

For some New Urbanists, there are weightier issues than the economic and aesthetic ones. Kunstler, in particular, sees surburban sprawl as a threat to America's very soul.

"We are spiritually impoverishing ourselves by living in these environments," Kunstler says. "Our traditional culture and democratic way of life really stands to suffer if we keep this up."

In the suburbs, Kunstler says, "we've created about 30,000 places that are not worth caring about. That is a condition that is going to come back to haunt us ... because places that are not worth caring about add up to a nation that's not worth defending."

Gordon says sprawl is neither new nor uniquely American. "Cities have been dispersing for as long as we know," he says. "You can find literature from Elizabethan London when they were complaining about London spreading out."