New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures by Emily Talen

Author:Emily Talen
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Urban & Land Use Planning, Architecture, Landscape, General
ISBN: 9780415701334
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2005-08-23T21:00:00+00:00

square, the Lancaster square, to mention a few – testifies to the attention paid to civic space. As the primary organizational feature of the new town, the square had strong symbolic importance. A study of hundreds of courthouse squares in Texas revealed its dominance, articulated in numerous subtly different ways, but always the commercial and civic focus of the planned settlement (Veselka, 2000).

By the late period of Colonial America, the ‘rectilinear urban habits’ of Americans were well-established (Kostof, 1991), and thus the application of a grid across the unsettled territories of the U.S. in 1785 by Thomas Jefferson can be seen as a logical extension of the grid culture of U.S. town planning. But while the colonial grid had a strongly socialized notion of land value, in which land became valuable only after a building was placed on it, the unimproved grid that became the basis of nineteenthcentury expansion was focused on land speculation and consumption (Marcuse, 1987). It was one difference between planned and unplanned settlement.

Railroad and Streetcar Suburbs

How the concept of a ‘suburb’ contributes to American urbanism is a complex matter. If Fishman’s definition of a suburb is used – that the suburb, the ‘bourgeois utopia’, was an exclusive middle-class development that excluded industry and lower-class residents (Fishman, 1987) – then it is, on the face of things, not particularly useful for defining American urbanism in a positive way. It defies too many of the core values of urbanism – diversity and connectivity in particular. There is no avoiding the fact that most suburbs were residential enclaves, set apart ideologically and physically from industrial villages or towns meant to decentralize the congested city. They were satellites dependent on the central city and they purposefully shunned the integration of places of employment for the working classes. They were, in a word, exclusive.

Ostensibly, then, American urbanism should reject suburbs on the grounds that they are too often homogeneous socially and economically. However, this would be a mistake for the simple reason that suburbs designed as complete planned communities hold valuable lessons. Suburbs were (and are) the predominant American version of organized decentralization and should be studied for the rich legacy of design principles they hold. One approach to bringing suburbs into a discussion of urbanism then is to focus primarily on their structural components. As in the case of urban plan-making, the ability to draw connections rests on the ability to disassociate from the social rhetoric. The connection between suburban development and American urbanism will rest on issues having to do with human functionality and design coherence.

From this perspective, it is the degree to which peripheral human settlement was internally integrated that is of relevance. How ‘internally integrated’ is defined, and how it varies, constitutes the bulk of the discussion here. If such developments were designed as complete communities, rather than as expedient groupings of housing units – single-family detached or otherwise – there would be reason to explore them and assess their relevance to American urbanism. It is not just about excluding sprawl.

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