The New Suburbanism

"New Suburbanism," LTL

The so called New Urbanism is often criticized for failing to extend beyond the relatively affluent and mostly southern resort communities in which it originated. Its association with period architecture and prescriptive rules about paint colors and fence types has largely obscured the original aim of providing a new organizational framework for exurban development. It is interesting to see Frampton advocating for a system of suburban development that seems to be rooted in a similar organizational strategy, albeit one with the potential for employing a very different and less conservative formal language.

The appeal of New Urbanism for me has always been its obsessive attention to the typology of the urban fabric. I am unsure whether “New” Urbanism and “Landscape” Urbanism could ever become aligned, or whether they represent opposite approaches to the problems of the contemporary city. But it does seem as though a truly ecological approach to urban infrastructure and development would require a level of planning, regularity, and efficiency that is difficult to imagine in the ephemeral and shifting urban landscape that Corner describes in “Terra Fluxus.” Cities house human activity, so it is exciting to envision a continuous, flexible, and well staged network of lan-fra-tecture extending to every underused corner of the cityscape and binding it back together. Still, I wonder whether a more modest project involving sensible land use policy, transportation connections, and infrastructural efficiency might achieve many of the same ends much more quickly, with the same opportunity for heightened landscape experience, and at a fraction of the cost.