New Urbanism is a planning and development approach based on the principles

of how cities and towns had been built for the last several centuries: walkable
blocks and streets, housing and shopping in close proximity, and accessible
public spaces. In other words: New Urbanism focuses on human-scaled urban
design.
The principles, articulated in the Charter of the New Urbanism, were developed
to offer alternatives to the sprawling, single-use, low-density patterns typical of
post-WWII development, which have been shown to inflict negative economic,
health, and environmental impacts on communities.
These design and development principles can be applied to new development,
urban infill and revitalization, and preservation. They can be applied to all scales
of development in the full range of places including rural Main Streets, booming
suburban areas, urban neighborhoods, dense city centers, and even entire
regions.
New Urbanists want to see those human-scale neighborhoods
return. We create tools to reform zoning and street design and develop
underutilized building typeslike shopfront houses and courtyard unitsthat
contribute to diverse neighborhoods. We advocate for villages, towns, and cities
consisting of neighborhoods designed around a five-minute walk from center to
edge. These ideas are fundamental to New Urbanist thinking.
New Urbanists make placemaking and public space a high priority. New
Urbanist streets are designed for peoplerather than just carsand
accommodate multimodal transportation including walking, bicycling, transit use,
and driving. We believe in providing plazas, squares, sidewalks, cafes, and
porches to host daily interaction and public life.
New Urbanism is pragmatic. Great design is not useful if it can't be built. New
Urbanists work with and include production builders, small developers, traffic
engineers, appraisers and financial institutions, public officials, citizens and
others with influence over the built environment to come up with implementable
solutions.
New Urbanism is focused on design, which is critical to the function of
communities. The size and shape of a plaza will help determine whether it is
consistently alive with people or windswept and vacant. The organization of
buildings in a neighborhood will help establish its character. Combining
appropriate design elements makes places that are greater than the sum of their
parts.
New Urbanism is holistic. All scales, from the metropolitan region to the single
building, are related. A building that is connected to a transit stop will help the
region function better, and well-organized region benefits the buildings within it.
Streets that rely only on engineering tend to move automobiles and little else; all
disciplines related to the built environment must work together to create great
places.
Reclaiming underutilized and neglected places is a special focus of New
Urban design and building. Through the federal HOPE VI and Choice
Neighborhoods programs, for example, New Urbanism has transformed
deteriorating public housing into livable mixed-income neighborhoods.

Commercial strips with single-use development and excessive asphalt are

transformed into lively main streets or boulevards through new urban design.
New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally
friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods containing a wide range of
housing and job types.[1] It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has
gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning,
and municipal land-use strategies.
New Urbanism is strongly influenced by urban design practices that were
prominent until the rise of the automobile prior to World War II; it encompasses
ten basic principles such as traditional neighborhood design (TND) and transitoriented development (TOD).[2]These ideas can all be circled back to two
concepts: building a sense of community and the development of ecological
practices.[3]
New Urbanists support: regional planning for open space; contextappropriate architecture and planning; adequate provision of infrastructure such
as sporting facilities, libraries and community centres; [5] and the balanced
development of jobs and housing. They believe their strategies can reduce traffic
congestion by encouraging the population to ride bikes, walk, or take the train.
They also hope that this set up will increase the supply of affordable housing and
rein in suburban sprawl. The Charter of the New Urbanismalso covers issues such
as historic preservation, safe streets, green building, and the re-development
of brownfield land. The tenPrinciples of Intelligent Urbanism also phrase
guidelines for new urbanist approaches.
Architecturally, new urbanist developments are often accompanied by New
Classical, postmodern, or vernacular styles, although that is not always the case.
This new system of development, with its rigorous separation of uses, arose
after World War II and became known as "conventional suburban
development"[7] or pejoratively as urban sprawl. The majority of U.S. citizens now
live in suburban communities built in the last fifty years, and automobile use per
capita has soared.

Although New Urbanism as an organized movement would only arise later, a

number of activists and thinkers soon began to criticize the modernist planning
techniques being put into practice. Social philosopher and historian Lewis
Mumford criticized the "anti-urban" development of post-war America. The Death
and Life of Great American Cities, written by Jane Jacobs in the early 1960s,
called for planners to reconsider the single-use housing projects, large cardependent thoroughfares, and segregated commercial centers that had become
the "norm."
Rooted in these early dissenters, the ideas behind New Urbanism began to
solidify in the 1970s and 80s with the urban visions and theoretical models for
the reconstruction of the "European" city proposed by architect Leon Krier, and
the pattern language theories of Christopher Alexander. The term "new
urbanism" itself started being used in this context in the mid-1980s, [8][9] but it
wasn't until the early 1990s that it was commonly written as a proper noun
capitalized.[10]

In 1991, the Local Government Commission, a private nonprofit group

in Sacramento, California, invited architects Peter Calthorpe, Michael
Corbett, Andrs Duany, Elizabeth Moule, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos
Polyzoides, and Daniel Solomon to develop a set of community principles for land
use planning. Named the Ahwahnee Principles (after Yosemite National
Park's Ahwahnee Hotel), the commission presented the principles to about one
hundred government officials in the fall of 1991, at its first Yosemite Conference
for Local Elected Officials.[11]
Calthorpe, Duany, Moule, Plater-Zyberk, Polyzoides, and Solomon founded the
Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993. The CNU has grown to
more than three thousand members, and is the leading international
organization promoting New Urbanist design principles. It holds annual
Congresses in various U.S. cities.
In 2009, co-founders Elizabeth Moule, Hank Dittmar, and Stefanos Polyzoides
authored the Canons of Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism to clarify and
detail the relationship between New Urbanism and sustainability. The Canons are
"a set of operating principles for human settlement that reestablish the
relationship between the art of building, the making of community, and the
conservation of our natural world." They promote the use of passive heating and
cooling solutions, the use of locally obtained materials, and in general, a "culture
of permanence." [12]
New Urbanism is a broad movement that spans a number of different disciplines
and geographic scales. And while the conventional approach to growth remains
dominant, New Urbanist principles have become increasingly influential in the
fields of planning, architecture, and public policy. [13]
Andrs Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, two of the founders of the Congress
for the New Urbanism, observed mixed-use streetscapes with corner shops, front
porches, and a diversity of well-crafted housing while living in one of
the Victorianneighborhoods of New Haven, Connecticut. They and their
colleagues observed patterns including the following:

The neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square or a

green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner. A transit stop
would be located at this center.

Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center, an

average of roughly 0.25 miles (0.40 km).

There are a variety of dwelling types usually houses, rowhouses,

and apartments so that younger and older people, singlesand families,
the poor and the wealthy may find places to live.

At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently
varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.

A small ancillary building or garage apartment is permitted within the

backyard of each house. It may be used as a rental unit or place to work
(for example, an office or craft workshop).

An elementary school is close enough so that most children can walk from
their home.

There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling not more than
a tenth of a mile away.

Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which

disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes
to any destination.

The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows
traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.

Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street,

creating a well-defined outdoor room.

Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated
to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.

Certain prominent sites at the termination of street vistas or in the

neighborhood center are reserved for civic buildings. These provide sites
for community meetings, education, and religious or cultural activities.