It can be perilous to write about the New Urbanism because the rhetorical weather in its vicinity can be quite violent. Someone like me who sees virtues in the New Urbanism, but also wants to locate it within wider flows, risks being branded a traitor to true community by those who see New Urbanism as The Way, but also condemned by those those who shun it as Yet Another Deceptive Variety of Sprawl, or as a Nostalgic Idyll that avoids the Tough Truths of life today.
I don't think that the New Urbanism denies the need to moderate sprawl -- the New Urbanists make useful proposals about patterns of regional development and urban infill. They insist that while suburban spread can't be stopped, it can be made more dense, which seems to me a correct strategy as long as we recognize that spatial density is only one of the many kinds of density and complexity in places today.
On the other hand, while I respect the spatial strategies of the New Urbanists I do find their relentless insistance on "old time community" heavy-handed and unrealistic, and though it has marketing appeal. I think that this needs to be enlarged to include other kinds of "unities" and "families."
My compromise position has been (a) to distinguish between the problems of already built suburbs and the problems of new construction (whether infill or greenfield), and (b) to see New Urbanist communities as nodes in a network that permeates them and makes them new kinds of places, even as that is often denied by their standard imagery and sales rhetoric.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001