index

New Urbanism outline

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Houses in Seaside, Florida

  1. The New Urbanism offers a set of principles for new developments and infill. There are numerically more New Urbanist projects as infill within existing urban fabrics, but suburban "greenfield" New Urbanist developments have attracted the most media attention and will be the main focus here.
  2. On their surface and in their advertising, suburban New Urbanist communities appear to be closed and oversimplified.
  3. Though often criticized, New Urbanist principles have much to offer on both the neighborhood and regional level.
  4. Despite their traditional look, New Urbanist developments are more complex new kinds of places.

  5. Their look and feel is not quite the same as older towns, and they have a different place grammar from both traditional towns and from standard suburbs. These differences can be seen, for instance, in:

    1. Work patterns
    2. Transportation patterns
    3. Expectations for self-conscious community
    4. Their center of gravity
  6. They need to be explicitly located within their larger context.
  7. New Urbanist developments can be evaluated on several familiar scales, but also, as with themed places, on how complex they are and how they explicitly affirm their own complexities and links: acknowledging that they are new kinds of places functioning within the networks and flows.