What is New Urbanism?

My son asked me today, "What is New Urbanism?"  I don't know if he really wanted to know or was just humoring my need to communicate with him. He's listening enough to have caught the term and that's good. I think the younger folks are going to inherit and have to deal with suburbia and the recovery of the housing industry and the economy for some time to come. His interest is encouraging to me.  Perhaps where we have let down his generation, they will rise to make things better for their kids.

Here was my response:

The basic idea of New Urbanism is that communities should be built so that people can walk to all of their basic needs within about ten minutes.  Basically zoning one piece of land for one use and another piece for another use, essentially segregating uses, results in sprawl that cannot be economically sustained for the long haul.  It is more expensive to run all the extra sewer and water lines to the suburbs than it would be to keep businesses, schools, churches, and homes closer together and intermixed in essentially small towns.

New Urbanists are for more public transportation and pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly streets and against having an automobile-based society.  In well designed communities, people interact with each other because they can walk places and don't have to hop in their cars to drive everywhere.  This interaction enriches quality of life for individuals and the community.

My old neighborhood, Seaside Farms, was pseudo-New Urban as we could get most of our basic necessities via a short walk to the grocery, beauty salon, laundromat, mail place, coffee shop, bakery, fitness center, etc.  Homes designed for New Urban neighborhoods homes tend to be smaller, more efficient in their space planning, more energy efficient by design, built well with renewable resources, and placed on smaller lots.They are also more varied in size and style to encourage a mixture of people in different ages and stages of their lives to live together in the community.

The idea is pretty much that people have become slaves to big houses, big yards, and long commutes to make money to pay to our mortgages, maintain, heat and cool our houses, and there is a better way to live through communities designed differently.

Some malls and shopping centers are being converted into mixed use communities.  The idea isn't to tear everything down and start over; it is to implement changes in current zoning practices to allow mixed use, to retrofit neighborhoods and areas as time and money permit, and to implement these design practices in new communities as they are built. I think a lot of this is common sense, but we need public policy changes to allow the ideas to be implemented in existing communities and neighborhoods, especially in those areas ripe for re-development.

When you are looking for your next community, consider it's walkability, whether most of your needs can be met by nearby services, and how nice it would be to be out of your car for a while.

Learn more here:  New Urbansim