The encyclical of the New Urbanism

You didn’t have to be a person of faith this week to be moved by Pope Francis’s historic call for a new era of environmental stewardship. His rallying cry to protect the natural world, laid out in his second encyclical, began by invoking virtues that transcend creed and sect: responsibility, selflessness, service to our children and their children.

In his approach to urbanization and climate change, Pope Francis gave a global platform to the idea that the health of our natural environment is dictated by the shape and quality of our human communities—both our social connections and the physical places we inhabit.

Where and how we design, preserve, and build our streets, neighborhoods, towns, cities, and regions matter. Placemakers of all types, including New Urbanists, share with Pope Francis a conviction that our physical environment has a direct impact on our chances for happy, prosperous lives. Well-designed public places, neighborhoods, Main Streets, and rural villages help create community: healthy ways for people to live and socialize. These places also help reduce our impact on natural systems and can mitigate climate impacts.

Today, the ways we’ve chosen to build our communities have created a car-dependent lifestyle lacking the natural public interactions that previously characterized neighborhoods. Houses built on acre lots, gated communities, and the “drive till you qualify” mentality isolates neighbors from their community and segregates neighborhoods by race, income, education, and opportunity. These development patterns also contribute to our environmental and economic decline. 

Those of us working to plan, design, preserve and build streets, neighborhoods, cities and regions have good news for Pope Francis: practical strategies are being tested and refined in communities everywhere. Design matters. So do policies that prioritize investment and that restrict or enable choices we make about where and how we build and get around. The health and happiness of our communities, our families, and our environment depend on decisions we make about our built environment that serve the many and not just the few. 

We believe that investing resources in places that provide greater choices for housing, transportation, working, shopping, and playing leverage the integral ecology Pope Francis promotes. These places are highly productive economically and more resilient in the face of disaster, with stronger social networks that vulnerable populations like the poor and elderly can rely on in times of crisis. These neighborhoods also have the advantage of both reducing carbon emissions that make climate change more problematic and mitigating problems that already exist.

Here’s the good news: It’s working. Maybe not yet on the scale Pope Francis and other advocates of global collaboration hope. But we can point to signs of change in communities adopting these design and development strategies. For example, in a just-released study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, “,” the authors used street connectivity over time as an indicator of dispersed communities, which tend to have greater negative impacts on community and the environment. The study suggests that sprawl may have peaked in the mid-1990s. And while it’s hard to pin down exact causes, the researchers suggested: “… the largest increases in connectivity have occurred in places with policies to promote gridded streets and similar New Urbanist design principles.”

Pope Francis’s encyclical is a call to action – not just to Catholics or Catholic leadership – but to all of us. His bold stance on climate change and community speaks to a profound understanding of the crucial role that urban places will play in the coming century, in America and across the fragile developing world. Regardless of what philosophy drives us to stewardship, there is hope yet for protecting our endangered wild places and our fragile ecosystems, and it starts in the most human of domains; our neighborhoods, towns, and cities.

Lynn Richards is President and CEO, The Congress for the New Urbanism