This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.
File this one under “only in Vancouver.” Trevor Boddy has an interesting piece in the Canadian Globe and Mail critiquing New Urbanism from the left. It’s not an argument one hears often in the states:
We Vancouverites sell American planners and developers high density, high amenity urban development attuned to the needs of the new century. Then local developers like the Century Group go consultant shopping in Miami and end up buying the terminally pleasant nostalgia of New Urbanism. Go figure.
Actually, checking the figures helps puncture New Urbanism’s claims, especially the spiel that schemes like the one for the Southlands development present a radical increase in suburban residential densities. While this may be true by the standards of the sunbelt United States, Canadian cities have historically developed at higher densities, largely because we lack such sprawl-inducing public policies as the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and the federally funded interstate highway system.
New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning’s equivalent of the “compact SUV.”
In the States, of course, folks like me tend to view New Urbanism as a step in the right direction. But for Boddy it’s a mirage. One one level, he seems miffed that the developers of this particular Vancouver suburb flew in [gasp!] American consultants instead of relying on homegrown talent in Vancouver, but his larger point is that the local consultants would have presumably advocated “real” density.
For my money, New Urbanism is mostly a mirage when it’s divorced from holistic regional planning that takes into account land use, employment centers, and, of course transit. The devil’s in the details, as they say.
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