Downtown Developments

Thomas Cox and Daniel Gehman are seeking to continue New Urbanism's expansion into America's downtowns. The two, along with the rest of Los Angeles- and Irvine-based Thomas P. Cox: Architects, are working on a clutch of city-based New Urbanist projects.

"New Urbanism was about trying to take some of the great things of living in a city and [applying them] to the suburbs, and now it's moving into the city with that same sort of emphasis…larger and denser and taller projects," Gehman says. "I think it works if you manage to create it in a way that you have a critical mass of people living within walking distance [of urban amenities]. How far you can walk in 10 minutes is a very important factor. People will not walk farther than 10 minutes."

Cox says creating a New Urbanist community in the suburbs is easier than creating one in cities, where working around existing infrastructures can prove challenging. "It's easier to create a walkable community in more suburban environments," he says. "In urban environments, it can be harder to create that activity. You're often coming into a community that is bombed out, for all intents and purposes. You're on the urban edge and, as a result, you're creating that walkability and that friendliness and environment with mixed-use and sidewalks and pocket parks and community walkways [where] gathering areas are essential."

Gehman, who has studied the differences between suburban and urban applications of New Urbanism, believes that the movement has more than one face. "People who form households and move to the suburbs are more homogenized in their expectations than people in urban conditions," he says. "Urban people get to see more [diversity] and it starts to drive their influences as well. When you put all these different types of people closer together, it takes a lot of amenities and programming of those amenities to really get that to work together."

This is not the case in the suburbs, Gehman says.

Young Movement, Old Roots

Joel Kotkin of the New America Foundation, who writes, researches, and lectures widely on New Urbanism, points out that the relatively novel movement has roots in quite traditional soil. "New Urbanism is kind of an amorphous term," Kotkin says. "A lot of it is not so new, and a lot of it is not so urban. Many of these ideas, the ideas of walkable communities and mixed-use, are nothing new. They were traditional before the Industrial Revolution. They were promoted…in England, and then practiced quite well by people well before New Urbanism was born."

Though a supporter of the main tenets behind New Urbanism, Kotkin tends to take issue with some of the movement's proponents. "Some of them are more orthodox than others," he says. "Not so much the people who actually do it, but the academics and advocates of the planning world. Sometimes their zealotry gets in the way of [development]… . A lot of them feel like they are correcting the abuses and problems of history, but history had answers for that long before New Urbanism."

New Urbanism's intrinsic difficulty, Kotkin believes, lies in its multiple definitions. "The question is: what is New Urbanism? I think there are very good models to follow, but sometimes the ideology may get in the way," he says. "If you think it's got to be transit-oriented, but only 5% of people are taking the train, that gets in the way. If you think that houses shouldn't be single-family, or should be this size or that size and families don't really want it, that could be a problem."

Toward the Future

Katherine Perez, vice president of development for Forest City Enterprises, has been a New Urbanism proponent for two decades. She now sees the movement pushing forward in encouraging ways, including a universal acceptance and professional adaptations of New Urbanism in urban planning and real estate development: "We've now had two decades of New Urbanism pollinating the planning and development factors [of real estate], so we can actually point to projects and say, 'that's a New Urbanist project.' And when you say that, it means it's place-based development, it has integrated uses, land-use efficiency, and for me it represents probably some of the best development in the country."

Perez says some of the strongest possibilities for New Urbanism exist in underserved communities such as New Orleans. "Planners are trying to take it into ethnically and socially diverse communities, not the Gaslamp District of San Diego, or San Francisco, but rather, Oakland. It's the places that were written off 10 to 15 years ago."

Forest City is spearheading Atlantic Yards, a $4-billion mixed-use development in downtown Brooklyn, New York. "The bones of the housing are New Urbanist in technique," she says. "The application of New Urbanism is no longer for the affluent and for the suburbs."

And New Urbanism has already had an undeniable effect on the areas it has touched, according to Perez: "It's really transformed places that had been recycled, been reintegrated, into communities."