“I love the city,” says Tom Moss, who’s sitting in the living room of the mint green two-story house at 115 Beachwalk Lane in Michigan City, Indiana. “I miss working downtown–the buzz of the Loop, seeing six people you know on the way to a meeting.”
“The article clicked with me,” says Moss. “There was a problem with development, and I had 106 acres of land to develop. I wound up learning the land-development business and neo-traditional town planning at the same time.”
Perhaps worst of all, say the new urbanists, suburbs are antisocial. They lack neighborhood gathering places, public buildings, and common areas that draw adults out and kids in. “I worry from a fatherly point of view what we do when we put kids on one-acre suburban lots,” says Moss. “They can’t explore, they can’t find themselves. Will they have a rich understanding of the world and the strength to be good adults?”
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Trapped behind their big lawns or inside their ever-running cars, the new urbanists say, suburbanites discover that these symbols of worldly success leave them not happy but strangely alone. The suburban desire for privacy feeds on itself, interest in public places and civic life dwindles, and people increasingly segregate themselves by income as well as by race. “Special-interest groups now replace the larger community within our political landscape,” writes new urbanist architect Peter Calthorpe, “just as gated subdivisions have replaced neighborhoods.”
(1) Mitigate suburbia’s ugly “placelessness” by putting houses close together, close to the street, and with front porches instead of blank-faced garage doors facing the street. Their architecture should draw on local and regional vernacular (untutored) styles. (This is where neo-traditionalism in architecture touches on neo-traditionalism in town planning, though the connection is more important to some than others.) DPZ’s codes require architects to follow standards regulating the proportion of building height to street width all the way down to the thickness of mortar bands between bricks. At Beachwalk Tom Moss got permission to use or adapt some of the designs from DPZ’s Seaside, Florida, development, because local builders had nothing in their standardized plan books like the street-friendly houses he wanted.
“Seductive” is too weak a word for this worldview. It’s easy to look down on the conventional suburbs, home of Pate Philip, the Newt, and their constituents–those well-off, ignorant white people who rarely visit the city and who imagine they’re in danger of imminent bodily harm when they do. By contrast, the shimmering blue vision of Seaside on the cover of Peter Katz’s recent book, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, looks good enough to eat.
