There are obvious evaluations to be made about design issues that would affect any development: the plans of houses, the ratio of street width to building height, length of blocks, and other issues of proportion and placement.
There is another set of issues that are peculiar to New Urbanist developments, concerning the success of their efforts at creating neighborhood community. Most of the developments are too young to be evaluated on this scale, though Ross argues that Celebration has been a success in this regard. Community building takes effort and careful planning; many of the knock-off developments that incorporate some New Urbanist features will likely suffer from the community equivalent of shoddy construction and superficial effects.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001