19 - The New Urbanism

Question 1

What is an example of new urbanism in Calgary?

Answer 1

McKenzie Towne

Question 2

What are 3 common criticisms of New Urbanism?

Answer 2

1. Its just a marketing strategy
   - new urbanist communities are often privately developed
   - developers have vested interest in selling its merits while muting its limitations
2. New Urbanism is great, for the upper-middle classes who can afford to live there
   - poor inner city areas typically excluded
3. The principles of New Urbanism are of limited use outside of Canada and the USA
   - New Urbanism is a reaction to suburbia and urban sprawl
   - because cities in other parts of the world have managed to limit suburban sprawl, New Urbanism is less relevant
   - European cities have been developing this idea for a long time

Question 3

What was a fundamental difficulty with modernism?

Answer 3

The persistent habit of privileging spatial forms over social processes

-David Harvey (same with Jane Jacobs)

Question 4

What does New Urbanism change and not change?

Answer 4

changes the spatial frame, but not the presumption of spatial order as a vehicle for controlling history and process

Question 5

What is the danger of equating neighbourhood with community?

Answer 5

• David Harvey
• New urbanism implies that neighbourhoods and communities are synonymous
• community has been one of the key sites of social control and surveillance, bordering on overt social repression
• community is a barrier rather than a facilitator of progressive social change

Question 6

What does new urbanism emphasize?

Answer 6

emphasizes building communities

Question 7

What is an example of the danger of equating neighbourhood with community?

Answer 7

Place stratification; racial/ethnic minorities are sorted by place according to their groups relative standing in society

Question 8

What is the important of social processes

Answer 8

• David Harvey
• understand urbanization as a group of fluid processes
• a utopian process looks very different from a utopian spatial form

Question 9

How do you achieve sustainability through processes?

Answer 9

• David Harvey
• enlist in the struggle to advance a more socially just, political emancipatory, and ecologically sane mix of SPATIOTEMPORAL production processes
• do this rather than acquiesce to those imposed by uncontrolled capital accumulation, backed by class, privilege, and gross inequalities of political-economic power

Question 10

What is the False Hope of Urban Design?

Answer 10

• urban planning technologies (modernism, new urbanism) embedded in social relations
• if we want to improve social relations we can’t rely on technologies that are embedded within the very social relations that are in need of improvement
• to change social relations we need to address it, not just the spatial relations that contain them
• developing socially just and environmentally sustainable social processes