Premodern,Modern,Postmodern? Placing New Urbanism into a Historical Perspective

At the time of writing, the Congress for the New Urbanism’s project database lists about two hundred "official" New Urbanist developments in the United States. See http://www.cnu.org/search/ projects (accessed February 13, 2009). However, the actual number is several times higher, if one counts all developments (including urban infill projects) in the country which are influenced by New Urbanist ideals (e.g., J. Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice, London: Routledge, 2005).

Grant, Planning the Good Community.

For example, see Planning Advisory Service Report no. 479: The Principles of Smart Development (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1998). More recently, the American Planning Association cooperated with the Congress for the New Urbanism to co-author and co-publish Planning Advisory Service Report no. 526: Codifying New Urbanism-How to Reform Municipal Land Development Regulations (Chicago: Congress for the New Urbanism and the American Planning Association, 2004).

For collaboration between the Congress for the New Urbanism and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, see Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design, 2000, http://www.huduser.org/publications/pubasst/principle.html (accessed February 13, 2009).

R. Beauregard , "New Urbanism: Ambiguous Certainties," Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19, no. 3 (2002): 181-94 (p. 182).

L. Krier , "Forward Comrades, We Must Go Back," Oppositions 24 (September, 1981): 26-37.

E. Talen , New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures ( London: Routledge, 2005).

C. Silver , New Urbanism and Planning History: Back to the Future, Paper presented at the Biannual Conference of the International Planning History Society, Barcelona, Spain (July 2004 ).

K. Till , "New Urbanism and Nature: Green Marketing and the Neotraditional Community ," Urban Geography 22, no. 3 (2001): 220-49; and K. Al-Hindi , "The New Urbanism: Where and for Whom? Investigation of an Emergent Paradigm," Urban Geography 22, no. 3 (2001): 202-19.

J. Saab , "Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow," Journal of Planning History 6, no. 3 (2007): 191-213.

In this sense, my goal is similar to that of Beauregard in his article "New Urbanism." However, I propose a different way to relate New Urbanism to modernism and postmodernism.

For example, see N. Ellin , Postmodern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 124-53.

C. Jencks , What is Post-modernism ? (London: Academy Editions, 1989).

M. Dear , The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 32-39.

F. Jameson , Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

J. Scott , Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

A. Huyssen , After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 181.

V. Havel , "Searching for Something of Value: Man as Observer Increasingly Alienated from Himself as Being" (speech excerpts), The Buffalo News , July 10, 1994.

D. Harvey , The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1990).

G. Stevens , The Reasoning Architect: Mathematics in Science and Design ( New York: McGraw-Hill , 1990).

C. Spretnak , The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World (New York: Routledge, 1999).

J-F. Lyotard , The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

Scott, Seeing like a State.

P. Allmendinger , Planning in Postmodern Times ( London: Routledge, 2001), 25-90.

B. Milroy , "Into Postmodern Weightlessness," Journal of Planning Education and Research 10, no. 3 (1991): 181-87.

Jameson, Postmodernism.

A. Giddens , The Consequences of Modernity ( Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also Beauregard, "New Urbanism."

Ellin , Postmodern Urbanism , 13-21.

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; see also Allmendinger, Planning in Postmodern Times.

R. Beaureagard , "Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of U.S. Planning," in Readings in Urban Theory, ed. S. Feinstein and S. Campbell (Malden and Oxford : Blackwell, 2003), 108-24.

Harvey , The Condition of Postmodernity, 66-98.

These are all well-established principles and assumptions of modernist urban planning, especially during the mid-twentieth-century "high-modernist" period (Scott, Seeing like a State; and J. Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989]). A. Irvine, for instance, summarizes the modernist principles in a similar fashion in "The Modern/Postmodern Divide in Urban Planning," University of Toronto Quarterly 62, no. 4 (1993): 474-87. Both Le Corbusier’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s writings exhibit the modernist planning assumptions well. See The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover Publications, 1987 [1928]); Concerning Town Planning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); the Athens Charter (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973 [1934]), and the Disappearing City (New York: Payson, 1932). Of course, modernism is a very broad and complicated movement and does neatly fit into narrow definitions. Furthermore, recent literature on "vernacular modernism," for instance, refutes the common assertion that modernism sought to obliterate local historic traditions in favor of the International Style (M. Umbach and B. Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005]).

P. Filion , "Rupture or Continuity? Modern and Postmodern Planning in Toronto," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23, no. 3 (1999): 421-44.

Calthorpe’s scathing critique of modernism as a failed ideology centered on "segregation, specialization, centralization, and an undying dedication to technology" is well articulated in the introduction of The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 11. See also P. Calthorpe and W. Fulton, The Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington: Island Press, 2001), 8-9; and S. Van der Ryn and P. Calthorpe, eds. Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs and Towns (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986), 43-45.

For instance, see Krier’s ridicule of modernism and modernist zoning in: L. Krier, "Traditional Ideas for Today’s Towns," City Magazine 10, no. 2 (1988): 20-23; L. Krier, "Critique of Zoning," in Leon Krier: Houses Places, and Cities, ed. D. Porphyrios (London: AD Editions, 1984), 32-35; and L. Krier, "Tradition-Modernity-Modernism: Some Necessary Explanations," Architectural Design 57 (1987): 38-43.

Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk interpret the ills of mid-twentieth-century urbanism as a result of an "out with the old" ethos dedicated to technical efficiency, "a rational model that could easily be understood through systems analysis and flow charts." This is a near-perfect definition of modernism. See also A. Duany and E. Plater-Zyberk, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2001), 11.

Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism , http://www.cnu.org/charter (accessed February 20, 2009).

Ellin , Postmodern Urbanism , 22-123.

Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning.

Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism. It is important to note, however, that New Urbanism is certainly not the only contemporary planning doctrine that can be qualified as postmodern. In fact, Ellin lists as one several manifestations of postmodernism in urban design. These manifestations include: neoclassicism, contextualism and vernacular design, historic preservation, master-planned and gated communities, and edge cities. The list could be expanded to include smart growth and regionalism. Furthermore, in terms of the planning process, a number of paradigms, such as advocacy planning, disjointed incrementalism, and communicative planning, carry postmodern elements (see S. Hirt, "Post-modernism and Planning Models," Critical Planning 9:116-27). In the broadest sense, the decline of expert-driven planning and the increase in public participation represents planning’s response to the postmodern embrace of plurality of views (see Filion, "Rupture or Continuity;" see also S. Gibson and K. Watson, eds. Postmodern Cities and Spaces [Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1995], 295).

Several of the most prominent New Urbanists have said that they are not postmodernists. Peter Calthorpe distances himself from postmodernism in the opening pages of The Next American Metropolis. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi state that: "We are not postmodernists, we never were." See "Learning from Denise Brown and Bob Venturi," Metropolis, September 29, 2001, http:// architecture.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=architecture&cdn=homegarden&tm=2 8&f=00&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=11&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.metropolismag .com/html/vsba/index.html (accessed September 19, 2008). I respect the New Urbanists’ right to self-identify in the language of their choice, but I take their claim with a grain of salt because I think they operate with a narrower definition of postmodernism than the one used here. Calthorpe, for example, speaks of postmodernism as "the architectural equivalent of a marketing gimmick"-a definition that reduces postmodernism to an architectural movement. I am also reminded that Sigmund Freud self-defined himself as "not a Freudist" (cited by F. Fromm-Reichmann, "Psychoanalytic and General Dynamic Conceptions of Theory and Therapy-Differences and Similarities," Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 2 [1954]: 711-21).

Beauregard, "New Urbanism;" also, T. Dutton, "Cities, Cultures, and Resistance: Beyond Leon Krier and the Postmodern Condition," Journal of Architectural Education 42, no. 2: 3-9.

There are many examples for this certainty. My favorite is in Krier’s "Traditional ideas." He ends with: "Here you are. There’s the rough outline for building towns in cities. Now it’s up to you to fill the gaps."

Krier, "Traditional Towns" and L. Krier "The Reconstruction of the City," Rational Architecture (1987): 38-42, cited by Dutton, "Cities, Cultures, and Resistance."

A. Duany and E. Talen, "Transect Planning," Journal of the American Planning Association 68, no. 3 (2002): 245-67; A. Duany and E. Talen, "Making the Good Easy: The Smart-Code Alternative," The Fordham Law Journal (April 2002): 1445-68; and P. Katz, "Form First: The New Urbanist Alternative to Conventional Zoning," http://www.nh.gov/oep/resourcelibrary/f/formbasedzoning/ formfirst.htm (accessed September 10, 2007).

See S. Hirt , "The Devil is in the Definitions: Contrasting American and German Approaches to Zoning," Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 4 (2007): 436-50.

Urban Design Associates , Celebration Pattern Book http://www.urbandesignassociates.com/celeb_pb_introduction.asp , and http://www.urbandesignassociates.compattern_Detail.asp?Sort=1&ProjectMainID=35&T=0&M=0&P=1&A=0&Section=3 (accessed February 24, 2009).

P. Pinnell , "Organon," in Towns and Town-making Principles, ed. A. Duany and E. Plater-Zyberk (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 105-10.

W. Lennertz , "The Codes," in Towns and Town-making Principles, 96-104.

For example, Dutton , " Cities, Cultures, and Resistance"

For example, Beauregard, "New Urbanism."

E. Chapman , "City Planning under Industrialization: The Case of Cleveland," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 12, no. 2 (1953): 19-24.

E. Johannesen, "Making and Sustaining a Legacy: Cleveland’s Group Plan," Inland Architect (November-December, 1987): 30-35. For a history of the Group Plan, please also see K. Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 49-64; and W. Leedy, "Cleveland’s Struggle for Self-Identity," in Modern Architecture in America, ed. R. Wilson and S. Robison (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991).

Cleveland City Planning Commission, Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Hough and Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Fairfax (unpublished documents made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department, undated).

W. Rose , Cleveland: The Making of a City (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1990).

Hough Revitalization Strategy (Kent, OH: Kent State University), unpublished document made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department, 1986.

UDA Architects , The Fairfax Pattern Book, unpublished document made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department, 1995.

There are many books on the history of builder’s manuals and architectural catalogues in America (e.g., D. Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Patterns Books, and Catalogues in American Architecture [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000]). However, I am not aware of any study of "mail-order" homes in either Hough or Fairfax.

UDA Architects, The Fairfax Pattern Book, and City of Cleveland, Residential Design Guidelines.

The complicated social causes of central-city decay in Cleveland are well beyond the scope of this article. I do mean to imply that the architectural characteristics of Cleveland’s historic neighborhoods, as described in the previous section, are in any way a leading cause. Similarly, I do not mean to imply that the mid-twentieth-century efforts to revitalize the area failed only because modernist architecture did not rise to the challenge.

Cleveland City Planning Commission, Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Hough and Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Fairfax.

Cleveland’s planning director at the time in fact argued that the city must approach suburban densities. See J. Howard , "An Urban Revitalization Program for Cleveland," Journal of the American Institute of Planners 10, no. 1 (1944): 18-23.

Cleveland City Planning Commission, The General Plan of Cleveland (1950). See also S. Hirt, "Toward Postmodern Urbanism: Evolution of Planning in Cleveland, Ohio" Journal of Planning Education and Research 25, no. 1 (2005): 27-42.

These include Downtown Cleveland 1975 (Cleveland City Planning Commission, 1959), as well as the famous Erieview Downtown Renewal plans prepared by I.M. Pei & Associates (An Urban Renewal Plan for Cleveland, 1961, and The General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, 1960).

N. Krumholz and W. Keating, A Century of Planning in Cleveland (Cleveland: Maxim Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2002); Also, D. Keating, N. Krumholz, and A. Wieland "Planning History Exhibition: A Century of Planning in Cleveland," Journal of Planning History 1, no. 1 (2002): 79-93.

For a detailed account of the impact of Urban Renewal on Cleveland’s neighborhoods, including Hough and Fairfax, see W. Jenkins, "Before Downtown: Cleveland, Ohio, and Urban Renewal, 1949-1958," Journal of Urban History 27, no. 4 (2001): 471-96; and W. Keating and N. Krumholz, eds., Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods: Achievements, Opportunities, and Limits (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1999).

For example, Welfare Federation of Cleveland, A Planning Proposal for the Hough Community (1959). This proposal analyzed the problems of Hough by applying various sociological theories and envisioned many social services, such as "family treatment units" and "specialized group services for children and youth."

For example, Cleveland City Planning Commission, The Fairfax Neighborhood Improvement Program (1970).

See Keating and Krumholz, Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods.

Hough Revitalization Strategy, Kent State University.

For example, Sasaki and Associates, Development Strategy for the Doan Center Redevelopment Area (1984).

Cleveland City Planning Commission, Connecting Cleveland: 2020 Citywide Plan, http:// planning.city.cleveland.oh.us/cwp/cpc.html (accessed March 6, 2009); also S. Hirt, "Toward Postmodern Urbanism."

Church Square was designed by UDA Architects, a major New Urbanist firm in Pittsburg. However, it is a rather generic looking strip-mall amidst a sea of parking, so I do not consider as a New Urbanist project.

UDA Architects, East 77th-East 89th Streets Euclid-Chester Concept Plan (1991), unpublished document made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department.

Church Square, which required substantial federal investment, received national attention when President Bill Clinton and a number of other high federal officials used it as a first stop on a multistate trip to promote their plans for "reinventing the government." See http://ech.cwru.edu/echcgi/article.pl?id=CSSC (accessed March 4, 2009).

There is another New Urbanist project nearby, in the even more distressed Central neighborhood. This project, the Central Commons, is a bit smaller (eighty units) and was, in fact, designed by Duany and Zyberk.

The development has been a stunning commercial success. According to the interviews, in 1993 the townhouses started selling at $120,000 and the single-family homes at $150,000. This is ten times the price of the average home in the vicinity. Regardless of the high prices, the units were sold in record short time and the project has no vacancies. In 1995-1996, the median household income in Beacon’s Place was about $55,000-about five times higher the median household income in the surrounding areas. Present prices are between $200,000 and $400,000.

For the many projects of City Architecture, see www.cityarch.com (accessed March 3, 2009).

Mr. P. Volpe’s biography is very impressive. Aside from being a member of the Congress of New Urbanism, he is also a member of the National Trust of Historic Preservation, the Cleveland Restoration Society and the Downtown Cleveland Partnerships. He served as Commissioner of Architecture for the City of Cleveland under Mayor G. Voinovich. See http://www.architectureofcleveland.com/html/volpe.htm (accessed February 2, 2009).

These include: the Urban Housing Award of the Smart Growth Community Excellence Awards, the Neighborhood Revitalization Finalist recognition of the Northern Ohio Live Awards of Achievement, and the Best Exterior Architectural Design on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Cleveland. See www.cityarch.com (accessed March 3, 2009).

Lot sizes are 3,600-5,400 square feet per single-family home and 500-1,500 square feet per townhouse.

Regretfully, staff at City Architecture was not able to find these design guidelines, which were created over fifteen years ago. Thus, I cannot provide quotes from them.

Dorsky Hodgson Partners has offices in Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, and Washington, D.C. To the firm’s credits, they have a number of very reputable projects around the country. Their Winter Park Village, a design that converted a vacant mall into a truly mixed-use street, for example, received excellent marks not only by the Congress for the New Urbanism, but also by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (see Malls into Main Streets: An In-depth Guide to Transforming Dead Malls into Communities, 2005, http://www.cnu.org/node/388 [accessed March 6, 2009]).

Legacy Village has received the Innovative Design Award from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC) and the Professional Design Award of Merit from the Society of American Registered Architects, New York Council.

See http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx (accessed March 6, 2009).

See Cleveland, Ohio: Invigorating Mixed-use Projects (2002), http://retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_dorsky_hodgson_partners_2 (accessed March 11, 2009).

See http://casestudies.uli.org/Profile.aspx?j=7668&p=1&c=9 (accessed March 11, 2009). Legacy Village has received some very negative press in Cleveland, however. For example, S. Litt, "New Center Can’t Live Up to Promise of Its Name," Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 2003.

See http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx (accessed March 6, 2009).

As a matter of fact, all interviewed planners, architects, and developers who participated in creating Crocker Park sought to distinguish it as a true mixed-use environment from the "fake" Legacy Village.

There are both condominiums and apartments in Crocker Park. Rents vary between about $850 and $2,200. Units for sale are priced between $300,000 and $800,000; see http://www.thecoralcompany.com/westhampton-pricing.html (accessed March 8, 2009).

See http://www.bialosky.com/index.cfm/Services/Planning (accessed March 8, 2009).

See http://www.bialosky.com/index.cfm/portfolio/MixedUse/Crocker_Park; (accessed March 8, 2009).

The latter quote comes from a published excerpt of an interview. See http://retailtrafficmag. com/development/construction/retail_mixing (accessed March 8, 2009).

The design guidelines include all sorts of other typologies, including a color palette. See Final Mixed-use Design Manual and Design Guidelines: Housing at http://www.cityofwestlake.org/departments/planning.php (accessed March 8, 2009).

This opinion seems to me strangely reminiscent of the 1949 General Plan of Cleveland, which defined planning as an activity that "separates the different uses of land"-a citation that I mentioned earlier.

However, an interviewed member of the development team believed that there are eight to twelve people who both lived and worked in Crocker Park. They are, however, not employed in the ground-floor retail stores, but in the free-standing office buildings. Interviewees expressed hope that more people will be able to live by their places of work in the near future, since Crocker Park is currently adding more office space.

Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism.

R. Fishman , Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York : Basic Books, 1987).

This is of course not to say that large-scale, unitary developments were not built in cities like Cleveland. The Union Terminal and Shaker Square, by the Van Sweringen brothers, are obvious examples. But during the interviews, I heard fewer references to such "mega-developments" dating from the 1920s or later; instead, the traditional, small-scale main street and the old neighborhood appeared to be almost everybody’s favorite model of good urban form.

J. Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( New York: Random House, 1961), 223-38.

See how Jacobs criticizes the New Urbanists in B. Steigerwald, "City Views: Urban Studies Legend Jane Jacobs on Gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her Legacy," in The Reason Magazine, 2001, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28053.html (accessed February 26, 2009).

I use again R. Fishman’s term from Bourgeois Utopias.

Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.

D. Harvey makes a similar argument regarding Baltimore in The Condition of Postmodernity.

The work of another key postmodern author, J. Baudrillard’s, on "simulation" as part of postmodernity has obvious relevance here (Simulation and Simulacra, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

Jencks, What is Post-modernism?

The architectural firms had no control on, say, whether to make Legacy Village more accessible to local residents or not, or whether to design it with fake or real residential floors. The firms were given a task and had to comply with it (the only choice they had is to decline the assignment altogether). It is hard to criticize the developers too, who by all accounts are committed to high-quality built products and have solid reputations in the region. My point is not to criticize anyone involved in these projects personally. None of my interviewees has the negative qualities that are often blamed on "stars" like Krier or Duany. The point is simply to highlight the complexity of New Urbanism as an urban planning method.

S. Campbell , "Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities: Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development," Journal of the American Planning Association 62, no. 3 (1996): 296-312.