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Move into New Urbanism?
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Frank Lloyd Wright style townhouses in Middleton Hills, a New Urbanist development in Wisconsin
Weekly market at Lund
It seems fair, though not too relevant, to ask whether I would want to live in any of the New Urbanist communities that I visited. The question is hard to answer because contingent factors get in the way. The communities I visited are none of them near the kind of university setting where I would find work. Seaside would be a wonderful resort to visit, but too isolated for my work or for any retirement I can envision. Celebration is far from any university. Only Kentlands is near to a complex of colleges and universities, though Reston is better located in that regard -- some professors from George Mason University live there. Employment issues aside, I found the New Urbanist communities inviting but homogeneous. That's less due to New Urbanist spatial principles than to the financial realities of development, but, once it is established, that homogeneity reinforces itself. Nor did the local cultural and intellectual life seem to be developed enough -- my brief visits could not really judge that, but Ross seems to agree, from his year-long stay in Celebration. Of all the towns in mentioned these narratives I found Lund the most congenial, because of its amenities, and because it has a big university, but the town is ten or fifteen times larger than a typical New Urbanist development.