The environmental movement has been essentially anti-development, and the New Urbanists, whatever else they are, are about development, and building more stuff. RYBCZYNSKI: This may be interfering with their ability to connect with mainstream America, although two of the most successful movements in the last century have been the environmental movement and the historic preservation movement, and New Urbanists have tried to form links with both. TAE: The New Urbanists are waxing indignant over sprawl, and we hear a good deal of gloating over fat people, McMansions, energy hogs, plastic, and so forth. They at least have an idea of what the city should be, and most city planners don’t.
You have to be very strong in the way you express yourself, and if you start compromising all over the place, pretty soon you don’t have a movement any more. Some of that I think has to do with having a movement. I think they’re sometimes too doctrinaire, almost religious in their inflexible dogma. And I’m certainly sympathetic to their focus on pedestrians versus automobiles, on studying older cities and trying to understand why they’re successful, and how these things can be adapted to contemporary life. I think they deserve enormous credit for that. New Urbanists are the only group of architects who have looked at the broader physical environment. Most architects have essentially abandoned any attempt to shape a broader environment–they’re creating very exciting buildings, and architecture’s probably more in the public eye today than 25 years ago, but it’s very much about signature designers and individual flamboyance. TAE: What is your view of the New Urbanist movement and its effort to restore the traditional pedestrian scale of historic communities in new suburban and urban development? RYBCZYNSKI: Well, first of all one has to say they’re the only game in town.
Here’s an excerpt on New Urbanism and land prices: There’s an interesting interview with architect and urban scholar Witold Rybczynski in the June issue of AEI’s The American Enterprise.
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