By Rob Gurwitt

Unless you’re in the habit of reading the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, you probably missed last week’s rambling ode to urban hollowness by Herbert Muschamp. Muschamp is the newspaper’s architecture critic, and over the years he has made a habit of taking on New Urbanist thinking, though never directly. Instead, he prefers a sort of drive-by criticism.

“Imagine being stuck in some suburban community planned by the New Urbanism,” he wrote in a typical passage this spring. “Talk about isolation: the buildings are close together but disconnected from anything larger than market research.”

OK. At least he was being clever, even if he was wrong. But what do we make of last Sunday’s musings, which ran under the headline “Public Space or Private, a Compulsion to Fill It”? He begins by bemoaning the fact that society seems bent on filling every empty public space, such as streets and train stations, to divert the people who use them. Then he moves on to suburban lawns. And then, for some reason, he writes: “Iced tea is too empty. It must be lightly laced with mango juice or it cannot be enjoyed. Water is too empty. It must come flavored with orange, lime or wild cherry. This whole package is called The New Urbanism.” I’m sure that Muschamp’s pals on New York’s cutting edge got a big chuckle out of that. So this is what Andres Duany and Peter Calthorpe and Ken Greenberg have been going on about for all these years: lime-flavored water!

For the most part, this can all be dismissed as the silliness of a critic who needs to get out of his head more. But there’s a troubling condescension here that I don’t think should be ignored: In essence, Muschamp is saying that we don’t even have to engage seriously with people who’ve spent the last decade thinking hard about just what does make a community a desirable place to be. That’s a peculiar position for the leading voice on urban form in this country’s leading newspaper to adopt.

The fact is, not enough people were paying attention to what makes cities and suburbs work before the New Urbanists came along. If nothing else, they made a couple of crucial points: Design has an impact on whether people like to be in a particular space or not; and successful communities are designed so that people want to be out and about in them. These ideas weren’t original, but nobody had said them for a while, and they badly needed saying.

Muschamp does have a point. You can go too far. It is entirely possible for a city to choke on festival marketplaces, shops selling designer chocolate and restaurants featuring the cuisine of some ten-square-mile patch of the Andes. But that’s not New Urbanism, that’s just the market at the moment. And I suspect most cities would far rather have that as an issue than acres of boarded-up storefronts and empty industrial sites.

Of course, that’s just so much Babbitry to Muschamp. “Emptiness, obscurity, failure, bleakness, pallor — such noir terms are not found in the vocabulary of civic success with which urban revitalization programs are typically promoted,” he writes. “But these terms should be permissible wherever culture comes up.” You bet. Return them to the planning lexicon, and Muschamp is sure to get what he apparently craves: empty cities.

Rob Gurwitt is a staff correspondent for Governing.

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Reader Response:

THE SAME OLD SALAD

Although I don’t read the New York Times, I am a critic of New Urbanism. I am not an expert in community design, just a nuts-and-bolts zoning planner. New Urbanism sounds great, but if you look at a lot of the communities that have been built or are being proposed, what do they accomplish? Communities are built with nice homes with nice front porches, small retail areas and some professional offices. Normally, as in the case with Seaside (a tourist community), Celebration, Duany’s proposal in Hillsborough County, Florida, and a new community proposed in Pasco County, Florida, all are built on the outskirts of the existing urban core. Yes, you can walk to a corner store, maybe buy an overpriced shirt from a local retailer, but to go to work, you must jump on the roads along with the rest of suburbia and travel to either the downtown or other office park center.

How many New Urban communities are self-sufficient and can provide their residents with adequate employment? How many of Celebration’s residents work in Celebration, not including teens who work in the retail areas after school? Probably not very many.

It is my understanding that Andres Duany was given the opportunity to try and redevelop a portion of downtown Tampa, a 60-acre site just outside of downtown. He declined, instead choosing to design a community miles from downtown. Why did he not create his so-called magical community in the old city? Because what he designs can’t recreate a real community and would have been too difficult to accomplish.

New Urbanism is another name for subdivision with different dressing on the same salad mix of homes with some commercial and office space mixed in.

Eric Cotton
Tampa, Florida

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