Sustainability and New Urbanism

Lars Stenberg (Communication)

How do cities work? What makes one city a great place to live, and another, a great place to stay on the by-pass and be thankful you don’t live there?

Remember the 50s and 60s? Remember the optimism of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City? Back then it seemed that the answer to the problems of the city - crime, overcrowding, poor living conditions and pollution - could be tackled by grand designs. The visions of hero-geniuses leading us into a bright new dawn. Acres of housing was swept away and replaced by vast lawns. People were housed in shining tower blocks. This was the future.

Now, when we look back at the remnants of the modern movement in city planning, we see only a very few successes, and a lot of failures. What once conjured up a utopian vision of happy moderns living in a manicured Eden, now reminds us of the dismal dormitory cities of the former Soviet Union.

What do we have as a replacement for the modern movement? New Urbanism claims to offer a real, sustainable method of town and city planning that will repair cities and make them the livable, vital things they once were.

It’s a laudable plan in principle. And it has a lot of principles. Core to New Urbanism is the concept of livability and variety. A city should be walkable, diverse, with sound design and good ‘place-making’ present in public areas. It should offer mixed housing, and its population density should be great enough to support local business in a traditional neighbourhood structure. Public transport is integrated and the whole caboodle must be sustainable.

True sustainability satisfies three criteria: economic, social and environmental. True sustainability is impossible without all three criteria fulfilled. An energy-efficient house design is not sustainable if each house costs half a million to build. It’s not sustainable if the natural fibre insulation is made by child labour in Asia.

New Urbanism understands true sustainability. Economic sustainability is provided by a pedestrian friendly design that encourages local shopping and use of local bars, restaurants and other facilities and by its emphasis on local production. Environmental sustainability is delivered in the form of more efficient housing, less reliance on cars, and an infrastructure that supports local production and consumption.

The most difficult strand of sustainability to ensure is social sustainability. How can developers and planners guarantee that their grand designs (albeit walkable ones) will deliver satisfaction to their users, and thus be truly sustainable? By working with the users to understand their needs and develop solutions that answer these needs.

There are a number of organisations that promote the culture of New Urbanism to Architects, Planners and other professionals. Many of these organisations, while they zealously extol the virtues of an ‘Emphasis on beauty, aesthetics, human comfort, and creating a sense of place’ cautiously avoid dealing with the difficult, expensive and time-consuming process of public consultation and involvement.

There are two issues here. Public consultation, by its nature, is time consuming. Organising and attending meetings, forming steering groups, having to travel out into the community, all of this takes time, and costs money. It can also yield results that sit uncomfortably with the project leader who has the grand vision. Public or community consultation often produces lists of very mundane concerns – dog dirt, graffiti, litter - and suggests equally prosaic, often low cost, solutions.

Resources to cover the consultation process can be budgeted in to any project if the process is recognized and given the importance it deserves. There are a number of initiatives to make community participation and consultation more democratic.

The real issue is between the community, with their day-to-day concerns, and the architects and planners, with their vision, their careers and their portfolios. It’s unlikely that anyone will win a design award for dealing with litter and dog dirt. There is a tension between grand designs and community concerns that must be resolved.

If New Urbanism is to deliver what we all hope it will, it needs to focus squarely on the needs of the people that live in the neighbourhoods. To deliver a truly sustainable solution New Urbanism needs to grasp the thorny issue of working democratically and of being accountable – not after the fact, but at every stage of the development process.

According to Complexity Theory, the best cities work as complex adaptive systems: robust, flexible and alive to the possibilities of change. The life of these cities is regulated more by its citizens going about their daily lives than by directives from City Hall. This ‘bottom up’ process is one that should be adopted for successful, sustainable city planning and regeneration.

If we let ourselves be seduced by the grand designs of superstar architects or planners, then we will have missed the mark, and the type of sustainability that is delivered by New Urbanism will not be truly sustainable at all.

Principles of New Urbanism - www.newurbanism.org
User consultation - www.useronline.org, www.gaiagroup.org/Architects/development-planning/
Complexity - Emergence (Johnson S)
Cities - The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs J)

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