PennTags Feed for /tag/new_urbanism

Crane and Schweitzer - Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment

Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment
Author(s): Randall Crane | Lisa A. SchweitzerScweitzer
doi: 10.2148/benv.29.3.238.54286

Built Environment

Electronic ISSN: 0263-7960
Volume: 29 | Issue: 3 New Urbanism
Cover date: September 2003
Page(s): 238-252

Abstract text

New Urbanism attempts to promote ‘greener' travel through physical design: especially through the provision of compact, walkable neighbourhoods served by transit. Achieving the desired environmental benefits effectively hinges on reducing auto trips, by encouraging people who currently travel by car to switch to walking for short trips and transit for long trips. However, while these aims may be simply asserted, the extent to which they are achievable is complex. The sustainability debate now goes well beyond merely technical discussions of environmental impacts to tackle the stickier political economy of how cities can be made to work in terms of accessibility, how environmental costs and benefits are distributed, and the concept of ‘environmental justice'. Who goes where, based on where they live and work, and the land-use levers available to affect why, have become the core policy focus. In order to understand the extent to which New Urbanism can contribute to sustainable transport and development, it is necessary to consider how different social groups using different modes of transport are related to the design of the built environment.

Built Environment, Vol. 29, Iss. 3 - Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment

Transport and Sustainability: The Role of the Built Environment

Authors: Randall Crane and Lisa A. Scweitzer

Page start: 238

Built Environment
Volume: 29 | Issue: 3 New Urbanism
Cover date: September 2003

New Urbanism attempts to promote ‘greener’ travel through physical design: especially through the provision of compact, walkable neighbourhoods served by transit. Achieving the desired environmental benefits effectively hinges on reducing auto trips, by encouraging people who currently travel by car to switch to walking for short trips and transit for long trips. However, while these aims may be simply asserted, the extent to which they are achievable is complex. The sustainability debate now goes well beyond merely technical discussions of environmental impacts to tackle the stickier political economy of how cities can be made to work in terms of accessibility, how environmental costs and benefits are distributed, and the concept of ‘environmental justice’. Who goes where, based on where they live and work, and the land-use levers available to affect why, have become the core policy focus. In order to understand the extent to which New Urbanism can contribute to sustainable transport and development, it is necessary to consider how different social groups using different modes of transport are related to the design of the built environment.

NYTimes - All Fall Down

November 19, 2006
Architecture
All Fall Down
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

NEW ORLEANS

The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's plan to demolish four of the city's biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.

Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city's urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.

But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city's public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.

NYTimes - A Town Divided Over a Fence

November 4, 2006
A Town Divided Over a Fence
By JILL P. CAPUZZO

While most of the 500 families who bought into the concept of a tightly knit neighborhood, public parks and “Main Street” shopping have been pleased with the outcome, some are starting to feel constrained by the rules governing the 400-acre Town Center. It was New Jersey’s first designated town center and was created along the lines of Celebration, Fla., the Disney-designed mixed-use community outside Orlando that set the standard for such places.
...
But despite the festive spirit of the town’s fifth birthday on Oct. 15, one issue that continues to cause unrest is fencing, and the benefits of wood versus vinyl.
To create a hometown feel, design guidelines for Town Center included things like old-fashioned front porches, houses painted in muted historic colors and white wooden fences. Within a short time, however, the wooden fences installed by the builders, the Sharbell Development Corporation, needed painting, and repainting.
With reduced maintenance being a prime reason homeowners chose to move to Town Center — where the yards are less than a quarter the size of those in neighboring communities — the wooden fences quickly became a problem. And when it was discovered that the backyard fences were made of pine rather than cedar and that year-old fences were starting to warp and rot, the battle began in earnest.

Talen- The Social Goals of New Urbanism

Title: The Social Goals of New Urbanism

Source: Housing policy debate [1051-1482] Talen yr:2002 vol:13 iss:1 pg:165

New Urbanism: It's in the Army Now - New York Times

June 8, 2006
New Urbanism: It's in the Army Now
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON

Fort Belvoir, Va.

ONE of the newer suburban developments in Fairfax County, Va., is the Villages at Belvoir.

Belvoir is Fort Belvoir, a military post. And the Villages, 15 New Urbanist towns, are on-post housing for soldiers and their families.

The first, Herryford Village, was occupied last year: 171 town houses and houses designed in a local Georgian Colonial style. It has a Main Street with shops and a clock tower, playgrounds, and village greens with open-air pavilions and centralized mailboxes where residents can socialize informally. There is not a tin hut or cinderblock house in sight.

...

Battle for Biloxi - New York Times

The City He Built By JIM LEWIS
The New Urbanists thought they had just the plan for remaking the Mississippi Gulf Coast city after Hurricane Katrina. FEMA, the mayor and a councilman thought otherwise.

An Architect With Plans for a New Gulf Coast - New York Times

An Architect With Plans for a New Gulf Coast
By ROBIN POGREBIN
Published: May 24, 2006

MIAMI — He's the man architecture critics love to hate: Andrés Duany, charismatic prophet of the New Urbanism, with his nostalgic prescriptions for dense, walkable neighborhoods energized by stores, mass transit and traditional housing....