OUTSIDE WORLD - CUDC Quarterly 2:3/4 - Fall 2002

New Urbanism Turns a Shade of Green
by Steve Rugare

Since the last issue of the Quarterly, editor Steve Rugare had the good fortune to deliver a paper in London for the conference of the International Planning History Society. Among the keynote speakers was Andres Duany, partner in the firm of Duany Plater-Zybek (DPZ) and leading protagonist of new urbanism and neo-traditional urban design. In a lively presentation, he discussed the current state of new urbanist thinking (as he did more recently in Cleveland), raising a number of interesting and/or troubling questions along the way.

Part of the designer’s job is to be an effective salesman of his ideas, and Andres Duany is certainly a master promoter. His talk was totally "on message",  hammering home a series of claims for the explanatory value and practical utility of a handy-dandy device called the "transect." Before trying to determine what that word means, it’s important to understand what it does for the message of new urbanism. On this point, Duany was disarmingly frank.

He began by claiming that new urbanism now incorporated an environmental perspective, but it became apparent very quickly that he was more green with envy than with enthusiasm. Like almost everyone, he undoubtedly supports the general goals of sustainability and environmental protection, but his particular interest in the environmental movement has to do mostly with its extraordinary success in gaining access to legal and regulatory authority over land use and development. There was more than a hint of bitterness in his voice–some of it justified–as he described how the regulatory priority placed on habitat protection and storm water management degrades the quality of most greenfield developments, helping to create a sprawl of service roads and retention basins.

Duany attributes the success of environmentalism mostly to the consistency of its nomenclature. The corollary to this is that planning jargon has not been coherent enough and therefore doesn’t support the authority of urbanism. So one of the things Duany wants the "new" new urbanism to have is consistent, scientific-sounding language.

Duany’s views on environmentalism are clearly the product of battles fought in the field, and his other justification for his new theory is a product of the same experience. He is clearly angered–again with some justification–at the durability of traditional zoning in the planning process. The neo-traditionalist critique of zoning, forcefully argued since the 1970s by Leon Krier and others, is at the very core of new urbanist principles, and it has only become more persuasive as the rationale for conventional land use zoning (the need to segregate noxious uses in the industrial city) loses its relevance in a new economy. Duany attributes the persistence of the zoning framework to its relative simplicity and convenience of administration. The new new urbanism should therefore emulate those qualities.

One can see that the failings Duany identifies in environmentalism and zoning are linked. Though he didn’t say so explicitly in London, one of the reasons environmental regulations produce undesirable results is that they are implemented through a zoning framework that imposes constraints and burdens on individual properties without articulating the character of the environment it seeks to promote. Both are primarily negative and proscriptive in form.

In response, Duany wants to create something as clear and convenient as zoning that nevertheless implements a positive design order in support of a regional and systemic environmental vision. In doing so he hopes to gain for new urbanism an authority that it hasn’t quite achieved to date. While the old new urbanism sought authority through the mystification that it was the product of an enormous labor (years of incredibly painstaking research into the long-forgotten secrets of urban form etc.), the new new urbanism will be authorized by the mystification of its jargon, which will allow designers and planners to gain influence with congressional committees and other decision-makers. Both old and new mystifications deserve careful scrutiny in their own right, but the more immediate question is whether the difference in packaging–and packaging is very much on Duany’s mind– implies meaningful differences in design principles and practice.

The graphic and theoretical core of Duany’s new formulation is the transect. This device was inspired by a diagram in Ian McHarg’s classic Design with Nature which shows the way ecological diversity is distributed spatially through a spectrum of contiguous zones (see below). Duany uses a simliar graphic to demonstrate the diversity of human settlement within a viable urban region. Rather than a sprawl monoculture, the transect illustrates a variety of environments, ranging from the purely wild, through rural and suburban, to increasingly dense urban patterns. This spectrum is divided into six zones, each implying a different relationship between the natural and the built and a different set of human choices about living arrangements.

This is the ur-diagram of Duany Plater-Zybek’s current practice (source www.dpz.com.) It shows the basic characteristics of the transect through an urban region. The focus is primarily on two issues, the ratio of built to open space and the degree of geometric regularity, both of which increase as one moves from "nature" (extreme left) to the urban core (extreme right).

Duany’s transect is inspired by Ian McHarg’s diagram. The divisions in Design With Nature are defined by systemic relationships; Duany’s are defined by visual pattern. That might be a very significant difference.

In Duany’s updated thinking, the derangement of the contemporary environment is largely due to the misapplication of characteristics of one zone of the transect to other zones. This happens because the environment is largely the result of interactions between specialists with no generalist to harmonize their ideas. The role of the planner, says Duany, is precisely to orchestrate the relationships between various interests and needs in a way that produces a coherent environment. The "score" from which the planner conducts is a detailed code (available online at www.dpz.com) that gives guidelines for the essential characteristics of the six transect zones, all of which should be represented in a healthy urban region.

While there’s nothing terribly revolutionary about the transect diagram per se, it does represent a substantial change in thinking for a movement that is still linked (perhaps unfairly) with the controlled, picture-perfect environment of early projects like Seaside, Florida, with its persnickity codes about picket fences and "charming" details. Walking through Seaside, some of us long for the honesty of a speculator’s strip mall or a motorhome beached in someone’s front yard. Now Duany comes very close to saying we can have it.

Newly tolerant, Duany reached a saturnine generosity in London and pronounced it the planner’s job to say yes to everything. "Everyone’s right," he said, even the third of the population that really wants to live in "utter crap." All desires could be accomodated within the regional transect if planners stop saying no and start allocating resources to achieve maximum choice and diversity without degrading the appropriate character of each of the six zones. In other words, there is a place for everything, and everything in its place, almost.

Some of this rhetoric of choice is probably only rhetoric. Old habits die hard, and new urbanism has said a lot of "no" in its history to date. But there’s no question that Duany wants the transect to be seen as a formula for diversity. In addition, it gives him a more persuasive way to talk about the diversity required in redevelopment projects–where the principles of the transect can be used to regenerate urban zones damaged by inappropriate suburban interventions–and he is clearly very eager to shake the perception that new urbanism deals only with green field sites. Leaving aside some of his more inflated claims, Duany’s presentation of the transect suggests that it is a useful way to talk about the planning of sustainable urban regions. It allows one to deploy the critique of conventional zoning (always the most powerful part of the new urbanist case) without having to take on the neo-traditional town as the alternative.

If, then, one is hesitant to embrace Duany’s new formulation wholeheartedly, it may have less to do with its substance than with the packaging he has devised to sell it. One might call this the Corbusier effect. While Duany is an ardent critic of Le Corbusier’s modernist urbanism, he is just as ardent a fan of Le Corbusier’s achievement as a propagandist. Like Corbusier, Duany is very good at encapsulating a powerful idea in a simple slogan or a compelling image. The downside of Duany’s persuasive art – like Corbusier’s – is that it tends toward masive exaggeration. Duany reaches bizarre heights of hyperbole when he claims that nearly everything can be mapped onto the six zones of the transect: cars, shoes, hairstyles, probably choice of mates, as well! As with Corbusier, there is a tendency to make everything dependent on built form, rather than seeing built form as the result of complex interactions with numerous social and intellectual trends. One of the reasons ecological thinking has become so influential is that it really does have the reach – the pervasive relationship to almost everything that matters – that Duany, following Corbusier, wants urbanism to have.

This suggests that Duany’s ambivalent relationship to environmentalism, part informed critic and part envious fellow traveller, reflects a real lack of interest in moving beyond familiar formulas and modes of expression. While the transect diagram is a useful device for explaining the components of coherent urban patterns, it does not in itself say much about the relations implied by those patterns. For example, in his discussion of the transect, Duany routinely referred to the zones on the left of the diagram as having more "nature" in them than the urban zones moving right. As a corollary to this, he stated the urban designer’s default position that density is in itself a sign of good ecological performance, meaning that one didn’t really have to think about greenness in those areas. It all made one suspect that for Duany (as for many designers), green ink on the plan equals "nature". From an ecological perspective the conformation of natural systems to human activity is an issue throughout the transect, and it requires a design response that goes beyond a theory based on the relative density and regularity of the urban pattern.

This might involve, for a start, issues related to transit, about which Duany had nothing to say in London. All the inhabitants of the transect seemingly drive cars, presumably compacts in the urban zones and SUVs in the rural ones. In fact, in Duany’s account, all the hypothetical inhabitants of the transect are predictably middle class in their behavior. In his imagination, the inhabitants of the various zones exhibit only a rather circumscribed diversity, happily choosing the well known brands of shoes and hair products that are appropriate for their particular zone. As several participants in the London session remarked during the following luncheon, all of Duany’s urbanites seem to be professional, heterosexual and very concerned about having the right cars and coiffures. In short, they’re an awful lot like the consumers that fell in love with the greenfield suburbs the new urbanists built before the "new" new urbanism. Having such a public at one’s disposal would undoubtedly make it much easier for the planner to say "yes" all the time.

It is also relevant in this context, that Duany treats all suburban development patterns more or less equally. The detailed standards promote a recognizably new urbanist approach for suburbs, but they don’t allow for any critical engagement with the rich history of suburban development types. However, as suggested by the account of the First Suburbs elsewhere in these pages, not all suburbs are created equal. They potentially represent substantially different ways of life and different promises for the future, and the same might be said about the variety of available approaches to every zone of the transect diagram. There is nothing in Duany’s extravagant claims to suggest that he is interested in a different future. His remains essentially a status quo approach, very in tune with the mood of America over the last couple of decades. In that sense, the "new" new urbanism looks very much like a triumph of packaging over substance.