Where New Urbanism is strong — and where it’s weak

New Urban News Article with tables, 6/1/2008

The New Urbanism is growing nationwide, but in some places more than others, an analysis of the movement’s geographical distribution shows.

Fifteen years after its official founding, New Urbanism remains a planning and design movement that’s distributed very unevenly across the country.

To gauge where New Urbanism is flourishing and where it is still in an earlier, slower stage of growth, New Urban News analyzed two sources: listings in the 2008 Directory of the New Urbanism and membership in the Congress for the New Urbanism. CNU provided a geographic breakdown of its members, who tend to be the movement’s activists. In the second annual edition of the Directory, published by New Urban News Publications, we looked at the locations of projects and offices of practitioners, developers, and builders. There is substantial overlap in the clusters from the Directory and CNU, but differences as well. The results appear in the tables on this page and the next.

Perhaps not surprisingly, we found that on a per capita basis, the District of Columbia has by far more people involved in the New Urbanism than any of the states. As an urban place with more than its share of policy wonks, the nation’s capital is proving to be fertile ground for new urbanists.