Geography Reference
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that it provides a more explicit identification of design codes, while the term 'new'
is really a contrast to mid and late twentieth suburbs. Few of the NU schemes that
have been built incorporate policies that relate to sustainability ideas or to the wider
issues of metropolitan planning and ecological issues identified in the first part
of the New Urbanism Charter, in part because of the political fragmentation of
urban regions which in the absence of any new regional governance still restricts
most planning to within the various political boundaries. Yet it could be argued that
the NU Charter does provide an explicit framework for improving the quality and
liveability of urban places, beyond the auto-suburb, and provided the basis for the
development of more detailed and focused ideas such as Smart Growth.
Despite their attractiveness, this review has shown that there is little evidence
that those areas developed under NU designs have really increased either commu-
nity cohesion, sense of place, social mixing, or provided real public spaces for all
residents of the city, or even reduced commuting and increased walkability. What
seems to have been downplayed is that it is the three fold character of the people,
their behaviours, and attitudes expressed in many different affective dimensions
that create the distinctiveness of communities and places (Davies 1992 ; Davies and
Herbert 1993 , p. 36). They imbue them with meanings that are often contested. So
design does not necessarily create meanings; to assume so is to imply a moral deter-
minism from some physical features. Perhaps the exception in the creation of major
changes in cities from NU ideas, at least in the aim of reducing auto use, comes from
the TOD examples that are based on mass transit lines. But even the TOD examples
are not really new. They are planned versions of the type of development, admit-
tedly at a higher density, of the nodes that evolved around the stations on the exten-
sions of mass transit lines in large cities in the early twentieth century (Hall 1988 ).
The real originality among the NU types may be the SG ideas, although few have
the large amounts of employment in mixed developments that would be needed to
reduce commuting. Yet the initial logic behind SG schemes tends to ignore the lim-
its on their creation by the zoning or development control principles in most cities
of the developed world, which segregate residential uses from employment-creating
uses. Such rigid exclusions may still be sensible in the context of industrial plants
that may be dealing with hazardous materials or processes, or even with warehouses
with large amounts of traffic. They may be less relevant in the case of most sorts of
offices—again unless they generate lots of vehicular traffic—which could provide
the type of high employment numbers to reduce commuting that the principle of
'mixed uses' implies. In addition, it is hard not to criticize most NU developments
for still being too small in size to make them the type of self-contained entities that
NU advocates seem to want them to be, given their use of the term 'urban' in the
NU description. Most are still not much bigger than a traditional post World War
II suburban size, which are too small to satisfy the threshold requirements of most
retail stores, which means there is bound to be a lot of travel outside the areas for
commercial needs, let alone leisure and employment. So they may simply be ex-
amples of what Scully ( 1994 ) aptly called a 'new suburbanism', for they are rarely
anything like towns.
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