Technical, in-depth, and how-to reports

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

It is often the case that important civic buildings are physically smaller than the private structures around them. Since the human species is given to mistaking size for significance, it is important to understand the ways in which civic buildings can indicate their importance without size, luxury, or hyperactive massing. The space around a civic building is the most important resource for this purpose.

New Urban News Article with images, 12/1/08
Goodbee Square near Covington, Louisiana, takes one of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas and turns it into a 21st Century stormwater solution.
A 1,280-unit development, Goodbee Square is laid out in checkerboard fashion with regularly placed squares. The project received unanimous approval from the St. Tammany Parish Zoning Commission in November. Jefferson proposed a similar layout as a way to blend town and rural living, and planner Andres Duany is quick to emphasize the connection in public presentations. “There is nothing like having third-party referral from Jefferson,” Duany jokes.

New Urban News Article with images, 9/1/2002
A study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has determined that roundabouts — popular among many New Urbanist designers — are much safer than other kinds of intersections.
The Institute examined 24 intersections in eight states that were converted from stop signs or traffic signals between 1992 and 1997. The results that emerged are remarkably favorable:
• Vehicular accidents overall declined 39 percent.
• Accidents resulting in injuries fell 76 percent.
• Accidents resulting in death or incapacitating injury plunged 90 percent.

Chapter 3 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

New Urbanism has been applied to an ever more diverse array of settings in the three decades since Seaside was planned on the Florida Panhandle and Battery Park City was replanned in New York. Seaside showed how to revive many of the best elements of small-town design. Battery Park City, with its requirements for consistent street-walls and open space showed how large, dense urban precincts could respect human scale and enhance the public realm.

Chapter 20 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

Author Douglas E. Morris has argued that loneliness, depression, violence, and other individual or societal troubles can be traced at least partly to the physical breakdown of community. This chapter argues that physical structure does not determine how we live, but it does influence behavior and affect people’s well-being. Evidence is presented from Harbor Town in Memphis, Celebration in Florida, Orenco Station in Oregon, Kentlands in Maryland, and elsewhere.

New Urban News Article with images, 4/1/2007
The design process for new urban military housing is revealed — with important lessons for how to cut costs without compromising principles.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 12/1/2004
Kendall offers a glimpse of how an “edge city” can evolve with the help of a plan and a form-based code.
The roughly half-square-mile heart of Kendall in Dade County, Florida, is imprinted so deeply with conventional suburban development that it is difficult to imagine it changing in character. At the very center of Kendall is the 1.4 million sq. ft. Dadeland Mall, surrounded by parking, on a 70-acre parcel. To the north of the mall are low-rise apartment complexes, to the south are various commercial buildings — all auto-oriented, with no coherent urban design. The entire site is bisected by a functional drainage waterway called Snapper Creek and is bounded on the east by a mega-arterial, US Route 1.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The previous Technical Page discussed the garage with respect to its use as parking, while arguing that its full potential lay as the principal domestic multi-use space. This consideration is not complete without exploration of the other auxiliary living or working spaces that a modern house may include. For the 21st Century, every dwelling, after all, will be to a lesser or greater extent a live-work unit.

New Urban News Article with graphs, 9/1/03
Real estate finance expert suggests that new urbanists increase equity and reduce conventional debt to reap the advantage of greater eventual appreciation.
Christopher Leinberger of Arcadia Land Co., a leading new urbanist finance theorist, believes that financial returns from new urban communities lag behind conventional suburban development (CSD) in the first few years. But if done right, those new urban developments will greatly outstrip CSD in the long term, he says.

New Urban News Article with images, 12/1/2006
Transit-oriented development project in Oakland highlights questions of how much retail to build and how to handle parking.
Fruitvale Village in Oakland, California, has become a reluctant symbol of the difficulties that transit-oriented development (TOD) can encounter.

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2004
The developer and designer set specific goals for placemaking and walkability in this infill revitalization — and then followed through on implementation.
If success has many fathers, then Southside in Greensboro, North Carolina, is well cared for. Locally, the 10-acre urban redevelopment is considered to be something of a marvel. Nationally, it won an American Planning Association Outstanding Planning Implementation award for 2003. But this wasn’t always so. The project initially met with a great deal of skepticism on the part of public officials and real estate professionals. As Thomas Low of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), the project designer, reports, Southside faced daunting challenges in the implementation of specific details that had great bearing on its success.