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The New Urbanists held their big
annual meet-up for four days last week and I stomped a big carbon footprint flying down to West Palm Beach for the doings. I don't know who exactly picked
West Palm, but it was at once peculiar, disheartening, instructive, and exhausting.
The Congress for the
New Urbanism has been throwing
this yearly fandango since its founding
in 1993 as a fire-eating reform movement dedicated to transforming the horrifying and toxic human habitat of America. Hopes were lofty
in the early days that the US public would recognize the self-evident benefits of ditching suburban sprawl for walkable towns, but it didn't quite
work out that way. The last frantic phase of sprawl-building commenced exactly the same time, jacked on easy lending steroids, and upping
the stakes of the battle. That story ended in the
baleful collapse of the housing
bubble and the sad particulars need not be rehearsed here.
During the boom of the 90s and aughties,
about 99.5 percent of the new real estate development was done by the conventional schlock sprawl-builders and the
New Urbanists did much of the remaining .5 - which was enough
to get their point across. Some of their projects (e.g. Seaside, Fla.) are now iconic examples
of excellence in urban design artistry.
Many others were botched by compromises
made in the planning board battles,
and another bunch were either half-assed
from the get-go or plain fakes. These traditional neighborhood developments were almost always built on greenfield sites, provoking controversy that could not be briskly dismissed.
At the same time, quite
a bit of New Urbanist work
was done in re-making existing town centers and in retrofits of sclerotic older suburban parcels, and their influence was later seen
in the many big city streetscape redesigns from Times Square to Santa Monica. Their
laborious work in
reforming the intricate idiocies
of zoning law made possible better
development outcomes in towns all over the land which adopted so-called Smart Codes.
The housing bubble bust massacred
the New Urbanists. Many
of the firms had tied their fortunes to the
production house builders and the commercial real estate developers doing large projects, often hundreds of acres, and when the market imploded around 2007 their work dried
up. Now there is very little
new real estate development
of any kind going on around the country. Many talents languish while the nation broods over
the fate of its obsolete suburban dream and fails to recognize that we have to make drastically new
arrangements for inhabiting the landscape.
But the mood at the 2012 CNU was still buoyant, considering. For all their vocational anguish, the New Urbanists are still about the only intellectual cohort in the USA with a coherent vision of what has
gone wrong in our society
-- our ruinous investments in futureless
infrastructure -- and what can
be done about it -- the reconstruction of traditional
human habitat as the armature for enduring economies. Compared with the brainless religious zealotry and sexual hysteria of the right wing and
the ruinous social services pandering
of the left, the New Urbanists
look like the only organized group of adults in
the nation who have not completely
lost their minds. So it was a pleasure to spend four days among them. They
are a valiant band of cultural warriors.
Events are now in
the driver's seat. The
long battle against the
continuation of suburban sprawl
is over, despite the
happy-talk noises made by what's left of the real estate industry. Half a decade of absolutely
flat oil production -- propaganda
to the contrary -- guarantees
that the suburban project is finished.
We're done building things that way
(even if we don't quite realize
it yet) so the New Urbanists have won
the argument by default.
Quite a few non-New Urbanist "pundits" such as Ed Glaeser, the asinine Joel Kotkin, and dashing Richard Florida predict
that the action has shifted
to the big cities, and that may appear
to be the case for this deceptive moment. But the mega-cities
are in for a tsunami of troubles all their own in the form of vanishing wealth, fiscal disorder, sclerotic
infrastructure failures, service interruptions, and
ethnic turf battles as
the effects of the epochal
economic contraction bite deeper
and harder. The inescapable downscaling
of America means that we are heading
toward a new disposition of things
on the landscape in just
the way the New Urbanists
have prescribed: a declension of ecologies ranging from dense, walkable human-dominated urban habitats in the form of traditional towns and cities through a range of rural
conditions running from farmland
to wilderness necessary
to support the health of the planet.
Time and nature will
help take care of the accumulated
suburban dreck on the ground. Humans are very skillful sorters of things and the disassembly of salvaged materials will be a big
industry in a world taking
a "time out" from industrial
progress. The timeless principles that the New Urbanists revived will be the common
sense of whatever we build in the future, even when the planning board battles of recent years are long forgotten. We will almost certainly
return to social conditions in which nobody will dare
put up a building devoid of conscious
artistry. There's a lot
to like in this quadrant
of the long emergency.
The 20th reunion of old CNU friends was a little disenchanted by the conference
site. West Palm Beach contains one of their showpiece projects, the nightlife and
shopping district called City Place that was created
out of a bombed out neighborhood.
Casual observers crack on
City Place as an "urban mall,"
but it's really just Rosemary Street rebuilt of
new traditionally-scaled buildings with shops and bistros programmed
in. A lot of it is generic chain business. Another sad element
is the cartoonish, low quality finish of the
buildings - sprayed on stucco
and ornaments with no
conviction. Both of these
failures of quality represent the fast buck mentality of the big commercial developers and
the larger vulgar so-called consumer culture they
served. But City Place does
include some pretty well composed
public space in the form
of a central plaza and a palm court running off it, and it was
full of people enjoying themselves
in the cafes those nights, and the ensemble managed
to incorporate a very nice Beaux Arts church-turned-theater (the Harriet Himmel)
in the Spanish neo-classical
manner.
The trouble was when you strayed
a block off Rosemary Street the fabric of the city fell apart. Some
of it was just vacant land. Further east between Olive Street and
the intercostal waterway stood
a swath of oversized giant condo towers that represented the worst of the lamented housing bubble. Many were "see-through" buildings of empty,
unsold units. The streets along these behemoths were as dead as any neighborhood on a Zombie planet, and traversing them to get anywhere
was hugely depressing. The convention center, where
the CNU meeting actually took
place, stood off in its own twilight zone of separation, cut off from the beginning of City
Place by the ghastly ten-lane
Okeechobee Boulevard. The five-block walk (of very large
super-blocks) to and fro from
my hotel was like unto
reenacting the Bataan Death
March under that brutal Floridian sun.
Things are changing fast
now though. The New Urbanists still standing are
the strongest and most nimble. They are also the ones most deeply engaged
in the trenches of architectural education, and they are as
certain to win the ideology
battles still raging in that realm as they won the battle over suburban sprawl.
Most of all, though,
I'm glad to be home in my quiet backwater of this poor floundering nation.
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