The New Urbanism

Since the early 1980s, a group of planners, architects, and developers have been rebelling against “conventional” suburban development as practiced in the United States since the end of World War II. Once mostly theoretical, the New Urbanism movement is beginning to yield tangible results, as communities based on New Urbanist principles are being built all over the country. Can these “designer” communities successfully compete in the complex financial and socio-economic marketplace of the 1990s, and can they truly solve the problems of auto-oriented sprawl as the proponents claim?