There is a lot of cheap disdain in attacks on New Urbanism, as on other proposals that accept the reality of sprawl and the need for further development.
New Urbanists get accused of building theme park suburbs, nostalgic recreations, thin commodified communities, and so on. But they are new kinds of places whose grammars and patterns of living are not identical with older towns.
Too often critics claim that the only solution is to ban completely all development on farmland, stop building highways, and other all-or-nothing, make-the-government-do-it measures. This resembles too closely those who opposed attempts to lessen the misery of industrial workers in the hope that increased suffering would push them towards total revolution. If we are looking for new concepts that might reform current sprawl and guide future construction, demands to destroy the whole pattern offer nothing but a feeling of moral superiority on the part of the critic.
In fact, though, the New Urbanism does offer large scale regional plans as well as neighborhood norms.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001