Cliff Ellis

The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals

Over the past two decades, the New Urbanism has emerged as a contro- versial alternative to conventional patterns of urban development. Although growing in popularity, it has received a sceptical reception in journals of planning, architecture and geography. This paper reviews criticisms of the New Urbanism and examines evidence and arguments on both sides of each issue. Critiques may be roughly divided into those involving empirical performance, ideological and cultural afe nities, and aesthetic qual- ity. While insufe cient evidence exists in some cases to make e nal judgments, it is argued that the critical attack on the New Urbanism remains unconvincing. Much of the critical literature is e awed by the use of caricature, inadequate sampling of projects, dee cient understanding of New Urbanist principles and practices, premature judgments, unreal- istic expectations and ideological bias. While New Urbanists can learn from the critiques of their work, and research gaps need to be e lled, the New Urbanism remains a resilient, practical and well-founded alternative to conventional land development practices.

Beyond Relativism Reclaiming the Search for Good City Form

This article argues that the search for a theory of good city form should be given a more prominent place in planning theory alongside theories of planning as a process. The professional practice of city and regional planning requires well-validated, durable criteria for successful outcomes. Fortunately, many recent developments in philosophy, science, political theory, and the arts challenge the postmodern relativism that has deflected attention away from normative theory toward procedural issues. The authors argue that planners should take advantage of these new ideas and launch a renewed quest for the elements of good city form.

New Urbanism in the Inner City: A Case Study of Pittsburgh

Abstract This article argues that community development efforts can be significantly improved through careful attention to urban design. One potential design application is New Urbanism, which offers promising principles for integrating affordable housing into inner-city neighborhoods. These points are illustrated through a case study of four New Urbanist projects in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here, New Urbanists have been involved in community-based, inner-city revitalization efforts for more than two decades. This is often overlooked in a critical literature that focuses only on New Urbanist communities in the suburbs. While it is too early to pronounce final, comprehensive judgments on these Pittsburgh projects, they illustrate an important new direction that is worthy of close study by urban planners, community development officials, scholars of urban affairs, and urban designers. Like the best-selling first edition, this report offers specific design guidance to planners, developers, and others involved in laying out, regulating, and reviewing proposals for “traditional neighborhoods.” For this edition, Arendt revised the model ordinance and subdivision regulations to make them easier to implement. Illustrations on the CD-ROM are directly tied to the provisions of the regulations. The CD-ROM also includes the authors running commentary on the regulations.

Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: the highway, the city and the future

Lewis Mumford’s life spanned the era in which American cities were rebuilt for the automobile and his writings addressed that theme from the 1920s to the 1970s. Norman Bel Geddes achieved fame during the 1930s for his imaginative evocations of future urban and regional landscapes designed for high‐speed auto travel, culminating in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Both of these men were influential figures during the period (1935–45) when the basic contours of American urban highway policy were codified. Mumford advocated a careful integration of street, highway and landscape in order to tame the destructive impacts of the automobile. By the 1950s he had become a fervent opponent of both central city freeway building and auto‐dependent suburban sprawl. Norman Bel Geddes embraced the emerging world of automobiles and freeways, and poured his energies into the creation of exhibits, models, plans and books showing how high‐speed motorways could shape a new metropolis. This paper compares these two men along multiple dimensions and argues that the contrasting styles of Mumford and Bel Geddes embody a recurring split in the American attitude toward cities and urban planning.Lewis Mumford’s life spanned the era in which American cities were rebuilt for the automobile and his writings addressed that theme from the 1920s to the 1970s. Norman Bel Geddes achieved fame during the 1930s for his imaginative evocations of future urban and regional landscapes designed for high‐speed auto travel, culminating in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Both of these men were influential figures during the period (1935–45) when the basic contours of American urban highway policy were codified. Mumford advocated a careful integration of street, highway and landscape in order to tame the destructive impacts of the automobile. By the 1950s he had become a fervent opponent of both central city freeway building and auto‐dependent suburban sprawl. Norman Bel Geddes embraced the emerging world of automobiles and freeways, and poured his energies into the creation of exhibits, models, plans and books showing how high‐speed motorways could shape a new metropolis. This paper compares these t...

Cities as art: Exploring the possibility of an aesthetic dimension in planning

This article argues that the integration of art and planning has been inadequately developed, and calls for a renewed exploration of their inter‐connection. City planning has had a variable relationship with art, moving between organic, civic minded ideals, and despotic notions of grandeur. Yet, rather than eschewing this history as nostalgic or irrelevant, there are ways in which a connection can be made between planning and art—if art is defined in a particular way. To accomplish this, it is necessary to first recognize that in the history of the human attempt to design cities, the loss of a connection between city planning and art is relatively recent. It is argued that the lost connection is in part a result of a rejection of modernist notions of urbanism. Spanning the history of city planning and city making, the notion of planning as art was in evidence until the mid‐20th century, about the time when modernist spatial ideas took hold. It is argued that divorcing all notions of art from city planning practice and theoretical development has been detrimental to the profession. The relevance of art to city planning needs to be reinvigorated, but this will require new ways of thinking, an acceptance of traditionalism broadly defined, and may entail new conceptions about the merger of planning with recent cultural and even scientific theory.

Capitalist dynamics and New Urbanist principles: junctures and disjunctures in project development

Both conservatives and liberals have criticized the New Urbanist movement with respect to its built outcomes and underlying theory. Conservatives admit that New Urbanism represents a particular market segment, but contend that most Americans prefer the traditional auto‐oriented suburb. Many critics on the left argue that New Urbanism is a false hope for improving urban life because it is limited to physical design, deals inadequately with issues of social justice and political economy, and is easily appropriated by the real estate industry as just another consumer product. The existing literature offers little systematic discussion of how the capitalist system matches up with New Urbanist principles and practices. This paper explores this issue by creating a framework for understanding the intersection of the three circuits of capital – finance capital, fixed capital, and research and technology capital – with three key New Urbanist principles – design fit; sustainability; and a composite principle encompassing civility, diversity, and equity. Given the three circuits of capital and the three design principles, there are nine points of interaction between New Urbanism and capitalism. Rather than taking capitalist principles for granted when evaluating the challenges facing New Urbanism, the authors use a critical perspective of this economic system. The conclusion suggests some changes in finance, regulation, politics, and design philosophy that may be needed before the full benefits of New Urbanism can be realized.

The art of adaptive design

Stephen Marshall’s (2016) paper is an intriguing exploration of urban design as a form of art. This topic is prone to confusion, so attempts to achieve a measure of clarity are most welcome. Marshall’s effort to encompass informal urbanism and urban infrastructure at all scales, along with formal compositions, is admirable. The paper embraces multiple professions and considers their various contributions to creating beauty in the urban environment. Marshall is quite correct to identify the limitations of conceiving urban design as large-scale sculpture or set decoration. The conceptual frameworks provided by Fokt and Lalo are used effectively to tease out the scope and special character of urban design as an artistic endeavour. However, one outcome of the analysis is somewhat perplexing. In the review of kindred arts, proximate arts and remote arts, the professional practice of city and regional planning seems to have faded away. It is true that many city planners have only a minor interest in urban design and focus on economic development, environmental planning, housing or various other specializations. Some commentators suggest that city planning has come close to abandoning urban design and should be classified as a social science or policy discipline, far removed from the precincts of art. In reality, urban design is a matter of great concern to city planners, planning scholars and students in planning programmes. Planners often participate in writing the codes that shape the vast majority of buildings in cities (Talen 2012). They review both private and governmental building proposals. While most city planners do not have the design or computer graphics skills to ‘be the designer at the drafting table’, so to speak, new technologies such as Esri CityEngine are making it possible for planners to create sophisticated designs for specific sites, urban districts, cities and even metropolitan regions. The days when planners were marginalized because they ‘can’t draw’ may be receding into the past. Planners also provide an important counterweight to the neomodernist orthodoxies that are enforced inside most schools of architecture. In any case, city planners should be included among the professions engaged in urban design (Lang 2005). In addition, historic preservationists provide much-needed insights into the management of urban space through time to enhance the beauty of cities (Semes 2009). City planners do bring a community-focused perspective to urban design, as Emily Talen has so ably explained in Urban Design Reclaimed: Tools, Techniques, and Strategies for Planners (2009). This is essential, since urban design should be informed by the opinions of users, along with social, economic and cultural data. But does this mean that the artistic dimension