New Suburbanism is not New Urbanism

In the essay “Conservatives and the New Urbanism”, the authors write:

At its simplest, New Urbanism

aims to build hamlets, neighborhoods, villages, towns, and
cities rather than subdivisions, shopping centers, and office
parks like those found in conventional suburban
developments … Maximizing walkability is essential.

What New Urbanism fails to esteem, we find present and future promise in. What New Urbanism frames as “in need of repair”, we frame as needing enhancement and evolution. The “middle metropolis” we call suburbia has been misunderstood for a long time. We are adopting a positive view of the suburbanized metropolis, the inner and outer belts of major cities, their special forms of landscape, architecture, commerce and amenity.

At its simplest, New Suburbanism

aims to plan intersections and avenues, neighborhoods, villages, towns centres, and communities of all sizes, including subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks like those found in conventional suburban areas. Maximizing individual mobility is essential.

In areas that are substantially urban or dense, local improvement turns toward making landscapes walkable and pedestrianized. The inner and outer suburbs represent the newer, flatter, more distributed form of metropolis, and it’s often thought to be un-walkable or worse. Since this is the main charge against suburbia (from which many other critiques are made), and since many of today’s suburban areas fall short of our aspirations for accessible, equitable environments, we as New Suburbanists will focus on walkability within a newly-conceived regional framework that supports the renewal and re-imagining of all types of environments, a philosophy of metropolitan growth that we call “Integrated Mobility”.

Whereas New Urbanism focuses on the quality of new construction and the achievement of human-scaled neighbourhood design, New Suburbanism focuses on i) the spatial requirements of regional processes, ii) the forms of governance needed to undertake sustainable and integrative community planning, and iii) individual metropolitan movement.

Whereas New Urbanism has supported the re-emergence of traditional town planning practices, and whereas this school of New Urbanists has developed an “open orthodoxy” regarding the design of neighbourhoods and cities, and whereas despite best efforts the Congress for New Urbanism is unable to enact “Sprawl Repair” at the needed rate of renewal, New Suburbanism is an attempt to avoid design orthodoxy by focusing on the plurality of landscape design, and to support the mending of large and small environments across the “periferie” — through a new focus on integrated community planning and development.

Broadly Defining New Suburbanism

How can we broadly define the term New Suburbanism without it losing its utility as a term? If suburbia is an approach to community design based on the dispersal of activities and exchange, how can improvements to the Middle Landscape increase overall access to goods and services for residents and visitors? How can incremental action be based on the mixing of growth policies and practices? It's much too late in modern history to have an ideology or philosophy anchored in built forms. Whereas New Urbanism argues strongly for traditional neighbourhood design (TND), New Suburbanism studies all past approaches to neighbourhood design and seeks blended solutions based on the accommodation of processes. New Suburbanism is an open approach to the study and making of metropolitan areas, specifically "Middle Metropolis" aka suburbia. We see the growth of city-regions positively, as being composed of mainly suburban landscapes and 'suburban fabric' with which the future city will be made, sometimes by mending, sometimes by creative remaking, and sometimes by preservation.

As an open field of research, dialogue and design, New Suburbanism focuses on the weaving and mixing of policies with place types, on combined architectures, and the blend of communities and economies being planned for. New Suburbanism is a dialogue about growth that's integrative and innovative out of necessity (low-capital) and interests (peripheries, globalization, etc). As Neil Brenner illustrates in Thesis on Urbanization, development today is based on global and regional economic processes, and the local accommodation of new residents and activities in keeping with environmental and town plans. How do new suburban environments come to be..

INS Event with Wendell Cox - Audio Recording and Presentation

On July 12th, 2017. the INS welcomed Wendell Cox to the GTHA. Wendell is an American urban planner, academic, and Professor at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers in Paris.

Wendell spoke about California’s anti-suburban growth policies and how the lessons learned could impact the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA).

Wendell's presentation can be downloaded here: Wendell Cox, July 2017, INS PowerPoint Presentation

The audio from Wendell's presentation can be downloaded here: Wendell Cox, July 2017, INS Audio Recording