Compared to familiar sprawl suburbs, New Urbanist developments are more concentrated, with smaller lot sizes and with houses arranged on streets whose layout and dimensions are planned to encourage interaction and neighborliness. These important features most resemble traditional towns, though even here there are differences, such as the more regularized set of lot sizes, and fewer access points to the larger network. Also New Urbanist neighborhoods make provisions for automobiles that were not common in older towns, such as invisible parking lots on the interior of blocks behind stores. New Urbanist street widths are more uniform than in a traditional town, and in general the neighborhoods have the look of resulting from rules rather than from practices and habits that have developed over time.
The ratio of homes to commercial establishments feels different from traditional towns, because commercial establishments are concentrated in neat town centers, and, especially because there are no productive workplaces except for home-offices. A traditional town would have had workplace sites of small-scale production, and a few larger productive sites, scattered throughout rather than absent or banished to outlying areas.
Within the housing types, for instance in Kentlands, there may be more apartments and more town houses than would have been expected in a traditional town. If the developments are able to achieve their ideal of mixed income housing, this too will be different from many old towns, especially in the spatial mixture of the incomes.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001