What is The New Urbanism?

1. One of the best explanations can be found in the article below from the New Urban News.
2. Following this article, is the Charter for the New Urbanism composed of the principles that define what the New Urbanism is all about.  They are simple and concise, in short - they are common sense - the same common sense that designed villages, towns, and cities for over two thousand years, until a radical departure occurred following WWII.

(excerpt from the New Urban News)

The New Urbanism: A better way to plan and build 21st Century communities

By Robert Steuteville and Philip Langdon

Through the first quarter of the last century, the United States developed in the form of compact, mixed-use neighborhoods. The pattern began to change with the emergence of modern architecture and zoning and the ascent of the automobile. After World War II, a new system of development was implemented nationwide, replacing neighborhoods with a rigorous separation of uses that has become known as sprawl or conventional suburban development (CSD). The majority of US citizens now live in suburban communities built during the last 60 years.

Although CSD has been popular, it carries a significant price. Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for the great majority of household and commuter trips.

Those who cannot drive are significantly restricted in their mobility. The working poor living in suburbia spend a large portion of their incomes on cars. Meanwhile, the American landscape where most people live and work is dominated by strip malls, auto-oriented civic and commercial buildings, and subdivisions without much individuality or character.

The New Urbanism is a reaction to sprawl. A growing movement of architects, planners, developers, and others, the New Urbanism is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable communities. New urbanists take a wide variety of approaches — some work exclusively on infill projects, others focus on transit-oriented development, still others are attempting to transform the suburbs. Many are working in all of these categories. The New Urbanism includes traditional architects and those with modernist sensibilities. All, however, believe in the power and ability of traditional neighborhoods to restore functional, sustainable communities. The trend had its roots in the work of visionary architects, planners, and developers in the 1970s and 1980s who coalesced into a unified group in the 1990s. From modest beginnings, the trend is growing to have a substantial impact. More than 500 new towns, villages, and neighborhoods are built or under construction in the US, using principles of the New Urbanism. Additionally, hundreds more smaller-scale new urban projects are restoring the urban fabric of cities and towns by reestablishing walkable streets and blocks in communities throughout the US.

On the regional scale, the New Urbanism is having a growing influence on how and where metropolitan regions choose to grow. Large-scale planning initiatives now commonly incorporate new urban planning ideas — such as walkable neighborhoods, transit-oriented development, and sociable, pedestrian-scale streets. Form-based codes and better-connected street networks are two instruments by which new urban ideas can be implemented at the scale of the region.

Principles of the New Urbanism

Let’s look more closely at the core beliefs of new urbanists. Seven key principles have been identified by Richard Bernhardt, a leading new urbanist who heads the Nashville-Davidson County Planning Department in Tennessee.

1. The basic building block of a community is the neighborhood.

2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with a well-defined edge and a center. The size of a neighborhood is usually based on the distance that a person can walk in five minutes from the center to the edge — a quarter-mile. Neighborhoods have a fine-grained mix of land uses, providing opportunities for young and old to find places to live, work, shop, and be entertained.

3. Corridors form the boundaries between neighborhoods — both connecting and defining the neighborhoods. Corridors can incorporate natural features such as streams or canyons. They may take the form of parks, natural preserves, travel paths, railroad lines, major roads, or a combination of all these.

4. Human scale sets the standard for proportion in buildings. Buildings must be disciplined in how they relate to their lots if public space is to be successfully demarcated. Because the street is the preeminent form of public space, buildings are generally expected to honor and embellish the street.

5. Providing a range of transportation options is fundamental. For most of the second half of the 20th Century, transportation agencies focused almost exclusively on optimizing the convenience of automobile travel, and dealt with transit riders, pedestrians, and bicyclists as little more than afterthoughts. We must give equal consideration to all modes of transportation to relieve congestion and to provide people with useful, realistic choices.

6. The street pattern is conceived as a network, to create the greatest number of alternative routes from one part of the neighborhood to another. This has the effect of providing choices and relieving vehicular congestion. The streets form a hierarchy, from broad boulevards to narrow lanes and alleys.

7. Civic buildings (town halls, churches, schools, libraries, museums) belong on preferred sites such as squares or neighborhood centers, or where the view down a street terminates. Such placement helps turn civic buildings into landmarks and reinforces their symbolic and cultural importance.

New urbanist prototypes

The first full-size new urbanist community was Seaside, the 80-acre resort development that Robert Davis began building on the Florida Panhandle in the early 1980s with lead designers Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

Seaside is an amazing project, both in its style and in its pursuit of community interaction. Davis’s pioneering project demonstrated that New Urbanism (or Neotraditional planning, as it was first called) is capable of reviving many of the best elements of small-town design.

Redesigning commercial centers

Another setting in which New Urbanism has proven useful is the single-purpose retail center. During the postwar decades, Americans threw up thousands of shopping and business centers that catered to the automobile, at the expense of pedestrians and community life. One of the first attempts to transform a suburban commercial district took place in the Town of Mashpee on Cape Cod. There, in the mid-1980s, developers Buff Chace and Douglas Storrs acquired a generic shopping center and then set about altering and adding to it — a process that has continued for over 20 years now.

The result, Mashpee Commons, is a town center serving a community that previously lacked one. At the impetus of Chace and Storrs, the sixties shopping center added a post office; a cinema complex that opens onto a public square; narrow streets and wide sidewalks comfortable for pedestrians; second-floor offices; apartments and live/work units; and civic and religious structures, including a public library and a church. The center has acquired many of the traits that made 19th-century downtowns appealing.

About half the new urbanist projects now under way in the US are on land that had previously been built upon. Many of these occupy reclaimed polluted land (“brownfields”) or fit into existing neighborhoods (“infill”) or convert failed shopping centers (“grayfields”) into sociable, mixed-use developments or renovate subpar urban buildings. Most of the early new urbanist projects were on “greenfield” sites — virgin soil.

The first large suburban greenfield project to employ New Urbanism’s principles was Kentlands, a 352-acre project in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Designed for developer Joseph Alfandre by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company in a charrette in 1988, Kentlands demonstrated that some of the development components common to the Washington, DC, region could be assembled in a more attractive and much more convivial manner.

Alleys and accessory units

This was made possible in part by placing most residents’ parking behind the houses, along alleys. When Kentlands and other early greenfield new urbanist projects were getting under way, there was doubt that alleys would ever catch on in the suburbs; in fact, alleys have become a well-accepted part of contemporary development, helping the facades of the houses to form visually appealing streetscapes.

Another innovative feature of Kentlands is the accessory unit — small quarters above a garage or in some other portion of a single-family home. These apartments provide opportunities for homeowners to obtain some rental income, and offer relatively inexpensive housing for the renter — usually a single tenant or a couple, since the units are small. Initially (and incorrectly) viewed as an assault on the character of suburban neighborhoods, auxiliary apartments are now common in new urbanist developments, adding to diversity, density, and affordability.

Many of the best-known examples of New Urbanism are early greenfield developments like Seaside; Celebration, Florida; Harbor Town in Memphis, Tennessee; and Kentlands. New towns on greenfield sites continue to be built — more recent examples include New Town at St. Charles in Missouri, Seabrook on the Washington coast, and The Waters in Montgomery, Alabama.

New urban infill developments in older cities and towns are proliferating as well — probably to a greater degree than greenfield developments. Redevelopments of suburban sites are also increasingly common. Some of the infill communities occupy formerly industrial properties. Others are redevelopments of public housing projects, shopping malls, apartment complexes, or even military bases. Still others consist of revitalization of underpopulated parts of cities. The diversity of new urban developments is steadily growing.

The new urbanists have taken on three other projects worth mentioning in this brief report. One is the reform of zoning codes, which were established in the first half of the 20th Century largely to separate uses and restrict density. Zoning played a major role in suburban development for the last six decades.

The problem of codes has inspired some of the most innovative work by new urbanists. A reform movement toward “form-based codes,” so-called because they regulate the three-dimensional shapes or forms of buildings and the public realm, has taken hold in recent years. These codes focus less on a property’s uses than on factors that determine the character of places — such as building frontage and placement. A substantial number of municipalities have adopted the SmartCode — which first became available in 2003 — and other form-based codes. But many more municipalities still have conventional codes.

Streets for people, not just cars

The second project is the reform of thoroughfares. Conventional street design focuses primarily on the expeditious and safe movement of automobiles. The concerns of pedestrians and mass transit are secondary. That single-minded focus is fading, due in part to the New Urbanism. Since the 1980s, new urbanists have made the following arguments that were radical in the context of late 20th Century street planning.

• Mobility is not measured primarily by automobile movement. Other modes of transportation such as walking and mass transit should be given an equally high priority on all but the highest-speed thoroughfares.

• Streets must have character as well as capacity. Streets consist not just of two-dimensional pavement, but also of building frontages, landscaping, sidewalks, lighting, and street furniture. The ensemble gives the street its character.

• Streets serve a vital social function. They are the heart of the public realm — the glue that holds communities together — and should be designed as pleasurable places to interact, to see and be seen, and just to be.

• Streets should be highly interconnected. Conventional planning employs a dendritic (tree-like) pattern, with local streets branching off of arterials and collectors. The blocks tend to be large, overall connectivity is low, and traffic is concentrated on major streets. New urbanists argue for well-connected street layouts that disperse traffic and allow for narrower, more human-scaled thoroughfares.

Finally, new urbanist designer Peter Calthorpe and others have been strong advocates for transit-oriented development (TOD). In the last five years, mixed-use, higher-density TODs have been built all across America with great success.

In terms of urban planning, we have come a long way in the last two decades. In the 1991 book Edge City, author Joel Garreau was able to say that Americans have not built “a single old-style downtown from raw dirt in 75 years.” Today we can see new mixed-use centers and downtowns in many places in the US, Canada, and abroad. There are strong indications that this return to urbanism will carry on well into the future. In the deep housing recession that began in 2006, urban housing has generally outperformed that of the distant suburbs. Demographic trends, such as the aging of the Baby Boomers and the emergence of the Millennial generation, promise to make urban places even more popular in the decade to some.

The looming climate and energy crises, likely to be dominant forces in the next half century, also favor the prospects of walkable, urban, mixed-use places. It appears that the 21st Century will be a new urban one.

CNU members ratified the Charter of the New Urbanism at CNU's fourth annual Congress in 1996. Applying valuable lessons from the past to the modern world, it outlines principles for building better communities, from the scale of the region down to the block. View also the Canons of Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism, a companion document that builds on the Charter's vision of sustainability.

The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.

We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.

We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

We represent a broad-based citizenry, composed of public and private sector leaders, community activists, and multidisciplinary professionals. We are committed to reestablishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design.

We dedicate ourselves to reclaiming our homes, blocks, streets, parks, neighborhoods, districts, towns, cities, regions, and environment.

We assert the following principles to guide public policy, development practice, urban planning, and design:

The region: Metropolis, city, and town

The neighborhood, the district, and the corridor

The block, the street, and the building

1. A primary task of all urban architecture and landscape design is the physical definition of streets and public spaces as places of shared use.
   
   
2. Individual architectural projects should be seamlessly linked to their surroundings. This issue transcends style.
   
   
3. The revitalization of urban places depends on safety and security. The design of streets and buildings should reinforce safe environments, but not at the expense of accessibility and openness.
   
   
4. In the contemporary metropolis, development must adequately accommodate automobiles. It should do so in ways that respect the pedestrian and the form of public space.
   
   
5. Streets and squares should be safe, comfortable, and interesting to the pedestrian. Properly configured, they encourage walking and enable neighbors to know each other and protect their communities.
   
   
6. Architecture and landscape design should grow from local climate, topography, history, and building practice.
   
   
7. Civic buildings and public gathering places require important sites to reinforce community identity and the culture of democracy. They deserve distinctive form, because their role is different from that of other buildings and places that constitute the fabric of the city.
   
   
8. All buildings should provide their inhabitants with a clear sense of location, weather and time. Natural methods of heating and cooling can be more resource-efficient than mechanical systems.
   
   
9. Preservation and renewal of historic buildings, districts, and landscapes affirm the continuity and evolution of urban society.

Copyright 1996, Congress for the New Urbanism. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce the Charter in full or in excerpt, provided that this copyright notice remains intact.