New Urbanism has been criticized for building sugar-coated suburbs# as nostalgic recreations of American small town life. It is true that many spatial ideas are taken from older towns, and it is clear that much of the attraction stems from the hope of recreating an earlier sense of community. But the result is not a traditional town.
New Urbanist developments are not as traditional as they are praised (or accused) for being. Despite their rhetoric, they are new kinds of places, whose grammar differs from that of traditional towns. Even their spatial patterns and their general look are somewhat less traditional than they seem at first. New Urbanist developments do what so many of our new places do, mix and match to enlarge possibilities. That they do this with a traditional vocabulary, and that sales rhetoric stresses traditional imagery and the importance of community, should not obscure the ways in which they are not simple returns to the past.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001