New Urbanism: Leading their people into the desert

The Economist this week writes about Mesa, a desert town in the Southwest US that plans to cleanse its faltering suburban identity through new development. With a new airport and a New Urbanist downtown, Mesa hopes to become an “aerotropolis,” built from nothing, surrounded by nothing and accessible primarily by plane.

Putting its faith in the power of repackaging, the city will dictate design but not use (a pillar of New Urbanism) in the new downtown that it is building from scratch next to existing suburban neighborhoods. The New Urbanist creed is that if you build a mix of uses, a utopian community will follow. In the mirage of the New Urbanism, culture and diversity, transit-oriented development, and environmental sustainability are always on the horizon but vanish as you crawl closer.

Pedestrian-friendly streets are a good start, but do not guarantee social cohesion by themselves. Past experiments with New Urbanism in Florida have been more de-facto enclaves than oases of inclusion. And how sustainable is a community that assumes that people will have to travel by airplane to reach their jobs and the next outpost of civilization?

To create this miraculous spring of growth and development, claims the Economist, the city “is looking both to the future and a long way into the past.” In this vision, air travel is the future, and New Urbanist design lends the charm and security of the past. But what past and what future are we talking about?

It is an imagined and exclusionary past in which people sat on their front porches and all got along happily. The New Urbanist version of the past forgets the bloody history of wresting land from Mexican ranchers and American Indians upon which the West was built.

New growth and construction have long been favored solutions to economic constraints in the US. As planned, New Mesa’s downtown expansion merely promises to be a new frontier for urban sprawl.

E. Mattiuzzi


Followup: read about the New Urbanism debate in the UK