David Milner is Managing Director at Create Streets, a European design practice dedicated to developing better towns. He’s now a relatively prolific writer as well, often penning pieces that describe universal principles of design, why places are great, and how to make more of them.
In a recent X post, David underscored these values through photos of Pontoise, a new town outside of Paris:
“This is Pontoise, France. A blueprint for new towns. This is a new piece of town built around a train station. [It] used to be surface parking, but [is] now homes, businesses, and shops. Most residential parking is underground, and with its excellent location, not as many people choose to have vehicles.”
In other words, out of nothing, Pontoise created something.
According to the International New Town Institute, Cergy-Pontoise is one of five New Towns of Paris built from the 1960s onwards, and is considered the most successful. With 399 homes across 4.2 acres, it pencils out to a remarkable 100 homes per acre. By comparison, most Southern US cities average around 4 homes per acre.
There are “plenty of businesses, too,” Milner adds.
With this density and ubiquity of retail services, Pontoise is precisely what urbanists love and seek to build more of.
Despite being designed at a neighborhood scale with buildings capped at five stories, Pontoise achieves a density comparable to Barcelona’s Eixample, which, at 100,000 people per square mile, is the densest area in the Western world.
But more than any data point can discern, it’s undeniably lovely. It’s lovely, and it’s new, which is so damn frustratingly rare. The reason Pointoise is lovely is that it follows the principles of traditionalism. In my view, this is the common denominator of great places.
THE TRADITIONALIST’S THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Traditionalism shows up in new towns in three ways: 1) land planning, 2) architecture, and 3) development strategies. We can see all three types present in Pontoise.
The architecture evokes traditional Paris, and the land planning makes it look like an idyllic French town. There is no mistaking where Pontoise is. This sense of place is an underappreciated criterion of great architecture.
And the way Pontoise was built out—incrementally, sans monolith—is the traditional form of townbuilding which is all but lost in the modern world. The result is that the new town has meaning because it has context. And it has context because it is built by and for a place. All of these are criteria for traditional design.
COMPARING IDEOLOGIES
The juxtaposition of traditional architecture as inferior (and modern as superior) is debated ad nauseam within the intellectual zeitgeist. It’s worth comparing the ideologies, which I have done here:
Commitment to tradition weaves a common thread through Pointoise. Its land planning and architecture are clearly rooted in history and place. While its development process obviously faced different pressures than Hausmannian Paris, its ownership is diverse. This is unheard of in comparable modern developments, which are increasingly owned by billion-dollar development companies, REITS, and life insurance companies.
Traditional design values are evident in these new towns. Notably, they are present in old towns as well. But none are present in the typical development of modern suburban America. And that’s the problem.
IF MODERN DEVELOPMENT SUCKS, WHY DO WE KEEP DOING IT?
Modern development, despite its baggage and repeated failures, isn’t just surviving—it’s thriving. Why? Because it remains the dominant force shaping our built environment, even as dissatisfaction grows. So why do we keep building places no one loves, instead of getting so much of what we loathe?
As a fundamental fight of our time, this topic is worthy of more than a list of bullets, but here are three key reasons that explain this failure:
DIFFICULTY of EXECUTION. Modern development has a high ROBD (Return on Brain Damage), meaning it is easier to squeeze out more profit with less pain. Modern development aligns with modern zoning and entitlement processes, which encourage uniformity and conformity at every step. Traditionalism, on the other hand, has a low ROBD; it’s riskier, harder to get approved, and with fewer underwriting sources, it's more expensive to finance. In American land use, those proposing anything “different” or “ambitious” are regularly punished by neighbors, politicians, planners, journalists, and bankers, which brings us to #2.
PREDOMINANCE of INSTITUTIONAL FINANCE. The institutionalization of development finance has accelerated the destruction of localism. And localism only comes through traditionalism. In the past thirty years, development finance has shifted to Wall Street. Wall Street is good at squeezing every bit of waste out of a process to maximize profits. While that creates obvious shareholder value, the problem is that these skills are wholly incompatible with placemaking. To the distal investor, a house is just a data point, not a place to raise a family, let alone build a community.
Moreover, traditional places are invariably built by local developers, while sprawl is built by regional or national ones (typically Wall Street-backed). Wall Street can borrow at 4-5%, whereas local developers must pay 7-12%. On a tilted playing field with rising interest rates, it’s hard to compete. The institutionalization of finance has been ruinous for traditional placemaking.
TOXIC HOUSING POLITICS. The politicization of land use encourages undesirable development because housing politics wastes volumes of time and money. And it takes time and money to build a beautiful development. Every dollar wasted on unproductive pre-construction engagement and/or years of political permission-seeking is a dollar not spent on architecture, civic monuments, or amenities.
As the development’s purpose is diluted (or lost) to years (sometimes decades) of entitlement, it follows that placemaking can no longer be a primary purpose. The politicization of housing absolutely puts downward pressure on the quality of place. They inversely correlate.
SOLUTION
How do we build more Pontoise? The solutions are simple, but they are not easy.
The right to build great places must be re-established as inalienable, and if state legislatures are needed to (re)-enshrine these rights, then so be it. Functionally, that means restoring the right to build the kinds of places all of humanity has loved for, well, all of humanity: dense, walkable, and mixed-use.
There are ways to build traditionally while also keeping toxic Wall Street at bay. This is a growth industry for researchers and zoning reformers. For decades now, government planners have used complex codes that have served the interests of the most well-capitalized and most connected —i.e., institutional investors.
After all, complexity favors the connected. And who is more connected than Wall Street?
Wall Street loves limited competition. Sclerotic American zoning is the most fertile ground for creating and perpetuating controlled, non-competitive markets. American planning is precisely why Wall Street is buying housing in the most overplanned American cities.
Though they are harder to find, there are also ways to discourage institutional dollars and tilt the field back in favor of the locals. Maximum (not minimum) lot sizes discourage institutional investment. Below a certain scale, Blackrock can’t play. They don’t want anything to do with a maximum parcel of 1/4 acre. It’s too small, and that matters. Durham effectively implemented a maximum lot size code for commercial districts in 2023, and I think other cities will eventually follow suit.
Theoretically, you could plan an entire urban area (or district or city) to be 100% lots no larger than 1/4 acre, which should be kryptonite to institutional capital.
Other cities, such as Lake Wales, FL, are working on plans to allow walkable mixed-use development by right. Flipping the script, they are forcing peddlers of modern planning (sprawl) to go through the gauntlet of the public process while showing traditional developers the fast lane.
What else can be done to build more traditional places like Pointoise?
What else have cities tried?
What do you think needs to be done to bring back traditional towns and place-based development?
Thanks for reading.
This post originally appeared on onHousing, a blog by Southern Urbanism founder Aaron Lubeck.
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Good article, and I agree with the aspiration of building more traditionalist style architecture
A few foods for thought though:
1. Old Paris is beautiful, walkable, desirable—and relatively expensive. For all its aesthetic mediocrity, New Paris is just as transit oriented and mixed use, and the scale of development there soaks up a lot of the demand to live in the Paris metro that otherwise would translate into even high prices. I’m all for dunking on American suburban mediocrity, but not all modernism is equal
2. Most towns short term *maybe* see change in development patterns with max lot size. But there are no Empire State Buildings or Seer Towers without big lots. At a certain point on the scale of development, I support great cities building great buildings, and I’m wary of inflexible rules that preclude that—especially when the goal is to make capital markets more illiquid. There are other ways to encourage incremental development than “stopping Wall Street” through more rules, like simplifying the complex codes and entitlement processes that favor institutional developers
Still aligned with the goal of walkable, transit-oriented new towns, just thinking through how we get there
Great architecture. It's the human scale, the walkability as well as the beauty that makes the heart sing.