Technical, in-depth, and how-to reports

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

Judged by numbers and ubiquity, the garage is the most successful new building type of the twentieth century. Houses prior to the rise of the automobile often trailed a variety of sheds behind them, but seldom did any of them have the size and functional complexity characteristic of the contemporary garage.

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, 4/1/2008
Stephen Mouzon’s latest book shows where designs of every sort, from “vernacular” to “classical,” fit on the Transect.
In the 1980s, Seaside, Florida, introduced architectural codes capable of organizing buildings into pleasingly unified yet varied streetscapes. In the last several years, New Urbanism’s organizational impulse has moved up the ladder, to the “Transect,” which shows how to arrange development across entire regions — from rural preserves to dense urban cores.

Chapter 15 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide
New Urbanism often fits many types of houses and uses into a single neighborhood — a mode of development that demands relatively sophisticated planning. This chapter examines lot dimensions, how much density to aim for, the impact of construction costs, and other facets of neighborhood development. John Anderson of New Urban Builders tells how parking has led him toward laying out lots in six-foot increments. Analyses by Strategic Economics suggest that a medium density often produces the best value in urban locations. A Houston study looks at the most profitable form of transit-oriented development.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 10/1/2003
Supermarkets fit into pedestrianoriented sites with basement parking, liner stores, housing above, and other techniques.
North America’s grocers are discovering that if they build a better food store, customers will beat a path to their door — or, in some instances, to their basement parking garage. Across the US and Canada, a growing number of supermarket companies no longer automatically insist on constructing a 55,000- to 65,000-square-foot box sitting behind a big expanse of asphalt. Instead, they’ll agree to operate stores that come up to the sidewalk, that have small shops along their perimeter, or that — in dense urban settings — have parking underneath.

New Urban News Article with images, 7/1/2004
Adoption of form-based codes in Petaluma, California, and Arlington County, Virginia, is quickly paying off with new buildings that line the sidewalks and streets. In Petaluma, which enacted a version of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company’s SmartCode in July 2003, a retail and housing development called Basin Street Landing is nearing completion. It occupies former parking lots in part of the 400-acre area regulated by the new code (see July-August 2003 New Urban News). Laura Hall of Fisher & Hall Urban Design, which tailored the SmartCode to the 56,000-population community, says over $100 million in development has been approved since the code’s adoption, including Basin Street Landing, which contains 20,000 square feet of office and restaurant space on the ground floor and 43 apartments above.

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

Considering what the pedestrian and driver see ahead is one of the basic tasks of good urban design; management of vistas is not an empty formal gesture. It helps people get around more easily and interestingly, and it displays that which the civitas considers to be significant. Physical structure and social structure in urbanism are often mutually revealing.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebars, 9/1/2004
Ways are sought to protect buildings and their occupants without seriously damaging urban livability.
After the loss of nearly 3,000 lives at the World Trade Center three years ago, no one doubts that large risks have come to American soil, or that government agencies must do something about them. But some designers believe the remedies that security experts have recommended — and that the federal government has adopted — threaten to harm the public realm through undue isolation of public buildings.

Chapter 23 of the New Urbanism Best Practices Guide

Abstract: In some places, new urbanists have been able to build compact, walkable, mixed-use developments without government policies encouraging or mandating this form of growth. But often New Urbanism stands a better chance of being implemented when governments set the stage. This chapter focuses on “smart growth” policies.

New Urban News Article with images, 3/1/2009
One of the basic tenets of the retail industry is that a store must be located near high levels of automobile traffic. Foot traffic can take the place of cars — but usually this is only the case where pedestrian counts are very high, such as in tourist locations. New urbanists found in the 1990s that if you place a grocery store in the middle of a traditional neighborhood development, the business often dies.

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

The last two decades have witnessed a heartening revival of traditional planning techniques. Element after element, the components of walkable, mixed-use, civically conscious environments have been restudied, redeployed into use, and gradually have gained widespread acceptance on the part of the public and even of non-new urbanist professionals.

New Urban News Article with images and sidebars, 1/1/2005
Toronto, its tree cover rapidly thinning, is one city looking for solutions.
Toronto residents are upset. Through-out the 2.6-million population Ontario city and especially in its center, thousands of street trees are dying prematurely, many within a year or two of being planted. Public concern is so strong that last fall the government organized a conference in which 200 municipal personnel spent an entire day discussing the problem with tree experts from throughout North America.