WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- The season, as it’s known, ended in April, leaving Lily Pulitzer-clad stragglers shopping for sunglasses on Worth Avenue and ordering the steak au poivre at Flagler's Until this week, when the stomping grounds of the Kennedys, Donald Trump and Rod Stewart get descended upon by a particular brand of aging rocker: the New Urbanist. The 20th gathering of the Congress for the New Urbanism runs through the weekend here, and the milestone raises some interesting questions about what happens when a revolutionary movement reaches middle age – and indeed in the world of planning and especially real estate development, becomes part of the establishment. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, New Urbanism was hitting the cover of Time as a grassroots architectural and design movement dead-set against auto-dependent suburban sprawl. CNU preached compact, walkable, mixed-use development, and traditional town planning principles for grid street layouts and user-friendly parks. It was back to the future, before World War II and the age of the automobile, before the soulless exurban tracts around cul-de-sacs, that arch-enemy of the connected landscape. Radical. Audacious. Heretical. Until it became gospel.
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