CITYBUILDING | New Urbanism’s Southern Seed
CITYBUILDING | New Urbanism’s Southern Seed
Why New Urbanism is emphatically Southern in origin and why it matters
Written By Rick Cole
Robert and Daryl Davis, the founders of Seaside, Florida, envisioned a modest coastal community situated on the state’s Panhandle. They entrusted the design to Miami architects and urbanists Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who planned a complete town that drew on the neglected traditions of Southern urbanism. Seaside’s Central Square was inspired by Savannah, its Ruskin Place by New Orleans, its Lyceum by the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, its northside neighborhoods by Charleston, and those on the south side by a number of Southern beach towns.
Ironically, Seaside’s embrace of traditional urbanism may have been too successful. The town wasn’t only cast as the setting for a major Hollywood movie—it landed on the cover of Time magazine, which called it “the most astonishing design achievement of its era and, one might hope, the most influential.”(1)
Seaside wasn’t designed to be iconic. It was designed to be livable. The fact that Seaside would make such huge waves—and become so popular as to nearly overwhelm its original aspirations—is a searing indictment of the way we’ve been destroying and rebuilding our cities and towns over the past three generations.
The enemy is not modern architecture; it is placeless sprawl. These are locations that have no distinct character, no history, and no beauty.
Above all, Seaside was designed as a community—where everything you need would be within walking distance, where front porches close to the street would encourage neighborhood connection. “Community, from what I’ve observed through travel, starts around shopping, meeting your neighbors, grabbing a coffee, taking your kids to school,” Daryl Davis observed. “I used those markers as a way to create community in Seaside.”
Seen this way, New Urbanism—the approach behind Seaside—is the architecture of community.
In 1993, Seaside designers Duany and Plater-Zyberk joined four other visionary architects to convene the first Congress for the New Urbanism in Alexandria, Virginia. They called it a “Congress” in deliberate tribute to—and contrast with— the “International Congress of Modern Architecture,” first held in 1928. The New Urbanists could not help but envy the dominant influence the Modernists had had in imposing their own radical blueprint worldwide. But they sought to counter the baleful arrogance of Modernists who had rejected timeless ways of building in favor of segregating uses and substituting the car for all previous forms of transportation, starting with walking.
Calling their movement “New Urbanism” was also deliberate. Despite respecting local and historic traditions that had shaped the design of cities and towns, the New Urbanists had no interest in turning back the clock. In place of the Modernists’ whole-hearted exaltation of the car, elevators, and air conditioning, they sought a more thoughtful approach, integrating such markers of modernity into urban patterns that had withstood millennia of human experience.
At their fourth Congress in Charleston in 1996, the New Urbanists put their signatures onto the Charter of the New Urbanism, which proclaimed:
We view 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.
First and foremost, New Urbanism values place—and the connection people have with places. New Urbanists believe that neglecting places erodes the foundation of everything that humans value, whereas investing in places enhances everything that humans value.
In this sense, the enemy is not modern architecture; it is placeless sprawl. These are locations that have no distinct character, no history, and no beauty, that typically fulfill just a single function. We park there, we work there, we reside there, we shop there, we drive through there. But beyond those necessary functions, the bleak landscapes of sprawl lack a shared and diverse public realm. Without such a public realm, community dissolves into private space. Shared space gives room for different people engaged in varied activities. That is the physical manifestation of community—and the physical setting for community, too. Community can happen in a park, in and around a neighborhood store, on a crowded sidewalk, or in any other public gathering space. The ties of community can be tight—among neighbors at a farmers’ market, for example. They can also be loose—such as among strangers at a transit stop. Whatever those ties look like, a robust public realm is vital to generating a shared sense of community.
It is precisely this shared sense of community that is breaking down all across North America. Sprawling suburbs and walled-off, self-contained urban “projects” deprive us of a place for community to grow. Evolving technologies accelerate our detachment from real life, happening in real places. Human beings crave belonging, so in the absence of a shared community, we gravitate toward self-selected faux-communities that more resemble tribes. Unlike citizens of a true community, these factions have no commitment to their neighbors or loyalty to the places they happen to occupy. When we are rigidly separated by income, race, and lifestyles, the fragile shared bonds of a democratic society inevitably fray into “us” versus “them.”
The model of Seaside is not a blueprint for how every other place should look. Rather, the inspiration of Seaside is that places can be unique. Places can successfully incorporate timeless traditions into modern designs. Places can offer a setting for community in all its many forms.
Most importantly, places can be authentic and inclusive. Seaside began a new chapter for Southern urbanism. Today, it is up to the thousands of builders, planners, architects, engineers, civic leaders, public officials, and active citizens who seek community to create, reclaim, or enhance places that matter—vibrant, prosperous, resilient, and equitable places that people love and where they thrive.
That’s the mission of New Urbanism. Like all worthwhile human endeavors, it involves hard work, faith, and patience. It is an unfolding story—and you are invited to help write the next chapter.
Rick Cole is the Chief Deputy Controller at the City of Los Angeles, former Executive Director at the Congress for the New Urbanism, and an urban policy expert. Follow him on Twitter @urbanistcole.
This piece was originally printed in Issue 1 of Southern Urbanism Quarterly.
(1) “Design: Best of the Decade,” Time, January 1, 1990, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,969072-1,00.html.