New Urbanism

Interesting question....my father is an architect, if you explain the term 'new urbanism', I'll let you know.

I'm curious about the term too.

Then explain old urbanism, please.

Found a link:

http://www.newurbanism.org/pages/416429/index.htm

I live the old, urban life. I can walk, and/or transit pretty much anyplace I want to. I can walk to a grocery store, several corner stores, some milk jug shops, a beer store, 3 hairdressers and i don't know how many other shops. The subway is a 10 minute walk from my house, and this was a significant factor in my purchase decision.

I've been following the new urbanism movement for quite a while. There are some interesting projects here where they're giving it a go. I think (without any true knowledge base), that the projects will be most successful where they develop more naturally vs. some of the projects which are very artificial.

ehBeth hits on it pretty much. New Urbanism is designed around the pedestrian or with the pedestrian's interests in mind. It's the Andy Griffith's "Meyberry" kind of place. What makes it new is that it is in answer to the sprawl that took place creating the suburbs. The suburbs placed people out of walking distance from some conveniences like malls, parks, work...etc. New Urbanism can either begin with an initiative to create a city that way - Columbia, Md. or Seaside, Fla. New Urbanism can also be a way to rejuvenate an abandoned city - some parts of Baltimore, Md. come to mind.

It's not really that. It's "urbanism" and then "new urbanism."

Funny that they're still calling it 'new urbanism'. I took a couple of courses which talked about this as part of a planning program in the late 1970's!

I think something like the Baltimore plan is more likely to be successful. Of course that may be because I don't much care for the look of the newer projects. One of the early Florida projects had a particularly planned look to it. I kept expecting the facades to fall off.

old urbanism is this concept where some rich developers go into a downtown slum area and buy all the really old beatup buildings like warehouses and tenements and stuff and kick out all the poor people and then like refurbish these buildings and tell all the young totally awesome yuppies that the coolest thing is to buy this condoized buildings for zillions of dollars and put brew pubs on the first floors along side Starbucks. I am pretty sure it's really groovy.

Heck, why didn't you just say eminent domain.

I agree with ehbeth, re natural development of these being more likely to succeed than implanted New Urbanism, but of course there needs to be a fertile ground for "natural development" of new urbanism to take place. My own particular interest is in promotion, wherever it makes any sense at all, of pedestrian life, or what I think of and have written about, at this point only to myself, as pedestrian culture. I became interested in all this in landscape architecture school, at the beginning of the 1980's, not because I learned it in school (I didn't), but that I started really paying attention to what is around me in cities and suburbs and the country between. I worked during my schooling doing landscape design for housing tracks, and formed as I was doing it some big levels of discomfort, such that I won't do that any more.

Just after the time I passed my boards my husband and I
took a vacation for the first time in years, oh, seven years, and went to italy for a month. Thus my interest in piazzas and their interconnection with their cities and towns and villages. Old piazzas are themselves being repedestrianized in many italian cities. I was seeing these at the same time as I was watching tracts proliferate into the real desert from the semiarid desert that Los Angeles is.

At one point I did follow the new urbanists, mainly two fellows who were associated though I don't think in the same firm. Daniel Solomon comes to mind, but there was a key person whose name was Peter (something).

On the site in Florida, Sea Colony, or whatever the name is, it is too Disneyesque for me, and ran into lots of difficulties.

Planning/zoning/design that provides a stage for the development of street life/pedestrian culture, plus a good transit system, plus the some of the car culture we do need sometimes... would be a start. I am not very interested personally in fully manufactured spaces, I like differentiation
placed by people themselves and not part of cookiestamping.

A friend and I took a thousand photos of the Venice walk steets, just before they became the haute address of various
screenwriters/etc. Wonderful place, built early in the 1900's, with houses on small lots facing each other with a sidewalk between. Behind each house, a number of feet back, was an alley, and then then same house/walk/house pattern. What happened was that the area between the house fronts, that is, the front yards and walk between, became a little more backyard-y. There were play sets and little ponds and picnic tables and doghouses and and and... as I say, more like backyards. The front yards were still private space and still semipublic, viewable from the walkway, but more sheltered in concept that the front yards on an ordinary street. As we mounted our slides in slide pages we saw, even more than when we were taking the pictures, the differences from place to place but also some almost musical rhythms. One house would be yellow and the next yard would have yellow roses, and the next, oh, a yellow flag. The houses themselves were of different vintages, but there would very often be some connecting visual item, color, or plants, or something else. In the few years since I left Venice, and even as I was packing... people were remodelling, maximizing the building lot ratios, putting up front yard barriers, and the nature of the walk streets was changing. I conjecture that at the time of the photographs there was a fairly high level of community association, and that it is lessening now.

I'd like to be able to afford one of those downtown, warehouse condos. Some of the units I've seen have been amazing - and even closer to the lake than I am now.

As to yups coming in, usually some time after the artists do, and revivifying, gentrifying, blowing up property values so that a vast skewing occurs, no, I am not for that. I would prefer all the city to be more pedestrian friendly, and that people in it had the money, first of all, and then the energy, to add the odd windowbox, etc. I am relatively uninterested in spiffy new stuff anyway, tend to like weathering in people and things, including housing.

I have been one of those artists, living in fairly iffy areas. One place I lived was an old Eagle's lodge, above an indian restaurant, an I forget what, and a car designer, across from a really loud and raucous bar. When I leased it there were seven broken windows and we slept in our coats. Anyway, yes we fixed it up, but that street didn't turn over into yupville for another twenty years.

Exactly dys, that's another way to look at it.

ossobuco, are you referring to Peter Calthorpe? Also, Seaside was the setting for the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. I agree, it is too Disney.

Your description of Venice brings on a funny thing about some of the more aggressive new urban cities. A color of yellow running from one house to the neighbor's backyard to the neighbor's flag is actually a requirement of the stronger new urbanism initiatives. Not so much as colors are concerned, but as far as having only a few housing styles to select from and being made to agree that the garage door placement will be on the side or the back of the house so as not to draw attention to it. And that only a few colors can be used. They won't tolerate a house that stands out like a sore thumb.

Back in the 80's, I had a small loft in Chicago's South Loop area. I was able to walk everywhere, to work, to play, to shop, because I lived so close to the various business districts. I loved it. It was great and I saved alot of money on transportation.
I guess this is what new urbanism is.

Yes, Peter Calthorpe. I was thinking it was Collier.
The colors I described weren't planned in any way, and we only really noticed by laying out the photos that there was a kind of rhythm. It was not a work project, we just took the pictures since we wanted to. Many of these places were sort of ratty, or, from my point of view, comfortable. On only getting to choose one of three colors, don't get me started.

I was the so-called facilitator for a large section of Venice in a landuse citizen participation workshop back in the early nineties. Each section of Venice could pick its building heights, envelopes, various constraints, to some degree; I think there were nine sections in the twelve week workshops. We hammered out with much discussion what we could agree on in our particular area. One thing, in the whole twelve weeks, that we didn't argue about, was materials constraints - no one wanted them. Venice has been the playground for Mayne and Rotondi of Morphosis, and Frank Gehry among others. Frank's own house in Santa Monica is famed for its angled chainlink fence used near the roof in a way that I guess sent neighbors there into frenzy. In our neighborhood meetings, we wanted not to proscribe any material but to have only performance criteria; we allowed a certain number of feet for an eagle's nest type area to be fairly high (forget the details now.), for example.

Anyway, years later when city planning put out the reviewed and decided requirements they combined workshop areas. Thus we found ourselves with rules saying, ha, no chainlink fence, and so on. Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. (letters from osso...) I have no idea at this point what finally came out of that. In my time of attention to it, city planners came and went, and there was no institutional memory. Very discouraging.

Bringing this slightly full circle, these guys did their architectural playing in Venice because it was cheap land, relatively. When we bought our house it was red-lined re bank loans. Now much of Venice housing is in the million dollar range (sob, I sold before all this). Frank Gehry is building a house for himself on the vacant lot about six lots from our old house. 'Course now he has gotten beyond chainlink and into titanium.

eoe, that sounds so much like it.

Ossobuco, you have some personal insight into this thread. I only have what I have read about and observed. It was a great awakening, as all things new are, to actually look at a building as a piece of art and not just a functional shell of rooms, doors and windows. I even started to see the bigger picture of city planning. My experience prior to learning in more depth about it was cities develop as they go. A road is placed here. Buildings line it. When no room is left. Another road is put in place. I never thought there might actually be some rhyme or reason to it.

New Urbanism does suggest some issues though. It is condensed living as opposed to the eating up of valuable lands, resources. It can also be, as dys had mentioned earlier, a displacement of the elderly or poor so as to make a more desirable living space. At first sight, I think it is a great idea. I do agree with you - ossobuco - that I like rustic scenes and not necessarily some newly fabricated "plastic" living arrangement. After further review of the information available, I do notice the negative aspects.

A classic book on urbanism, written by an amateur but read by many in the field, is Jane Jacobs 'Death and Life of American Cities'. I think that's the name. A little past its prime now, I guess, but might still be interesting reading.

Planner, planners. Some of the popes were planners. Sixtus the IV or V did the goosefoot arrangement of streets in Rome, I think to connect sightlines to key points, and then later on Versailles and Paris and Washington DC also got their odd goose feet. Mussolini tore down the borgo (neighborhood) to have a straight swath from the river to the Vatican, thus killing the arrangement that made entering Bernini's piazza at St. Peter's such a stupendous surprise. I love reading about all that. Um, another good book, in my opinion, and an easy read is by Edmund Bacon, called Cities, or maybe it was Design of Cities.

There was a second book called Cities too, that a tv series was made from, or vice versa, the book made from series scripts. Thus you had Peter Ustinov talking about St. Petersberg and Anthony Burgess doing Rome and Germaine Greer doing Sydney and Glenn Gould doing Toronto. I only tuned into that series toward the end and looked for it again for years later; never saw it again.

Geez, I'd better be quiet for a while.