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One of the books I’ve picked up in this cycle of research is Jill Grant’s Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice. I’m still working my way through it, but today I skipped to the good part where she actually breaks down the relationship between theoretical goals of New Urbanism and the visible effects of these goals in recent development projects. Her conclusions are not positive:
Car use shows no signs of decreasing. Public transportation ridership is increasing in some cities, but is still a very small percentage of overall transportation. Cultural attachment to car use is strong, too strong for urban design to overcome.
Density patterns have shifted significantly, but overall population per square foot of urban space is not necessarily increasing. North American stigma associated with high density housing remains. I’ve made the attached image to illustrate what is happening in many places. It is a bit of an exaggeration,* to make the tendencies more visible and show how New Urbanism didn’t even necessarily deliver on the density promise, the one change that seemed like it was happening. The increase in interior square-footage per person has actually increased the environmental impact in many ways.
One thing that Grant references briefly in this chapter is the idea of “hidden values.” These are values that are rarely or never articulated in theory but often achieved in practice: racial and economic segregation, even though New Urbanism is supposed to diversify communities; the maximization of profit for developers and speculators, and high turnover of residents, even though New Urbanism is supposed to promote connected, active communities of resident-owners; car-centric development even when New Urbanism is vocally opposed to car-centric development; status-symbol nature of new development marketing materials, even though New Urbanism is supposed to be about authenticity.
I will still say that Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the most important books of North America’s last century. However, the real impact of the New Urbanism movement has very often been the opposite of what she and other early New Urban theorists advocated for. Hidden values haven’t really changed, and this is why the theory can radically shift while the effects remain the same.
*On Sundays my friends and I frequently tour the open houses in our neighborhood. This weekend we saw one house listed as a 4 bedroom, 4 bath. It was located right near a busy retail street with an active, vibrant community; an extremely desireable location, rental units in the neighbourhood get snapped up very fast. We toured it, and were amazed to see that this 4 bedroom house was the residence of a single man who was rarely home. He used one bedroom as a guest room and storage, one as a tv room, one as an office and storage, and one to sleep in. Such arrangements are not that uncommon, we once toured a 6 bedroom in the same area that was the home of one retired woman. So this illustration is not such a gross exaggeration.
