Pedestrians, pocket parks and power savings: New Urbanist communities are becoming popular in Colorado, but how they are defined differs by project.

• Author: Lewis, David

"New Urbanist Project Construction Starts Soar," enthused the influential New Urban News in 2001. Among the 50 states in the journal's survey, California led the way. But Colorado paced the Rocky Mountain region, with "15 NU communities and neighborhoods ... under construction," a number that today seems laughable.

Fifteen? Just 15? You call that "soaring"? ColoradoBiz counts perhaps two score developments in one stage or another that call themselves "New Urbanist" and probably are.

Colorado's New Urbanist communities, or developments, are multiplying faster than jackrabbits in spring. The question quickly becomes, what is a New Urbanist development, anyway?

The question might matter to Colorado. If New Urbanist communities grow, and if they do what they're supposed to do, they can increase the state's population carrying capacity. They do this by reducing per-capita energy use when contrasted to competitive conventional urban and suburban developments, generally called "sprawl" by New Urbanism advocates.

New Urbanism conventionally means densely, diversely populated neighborhoods designed for pedestrians as well as cars, with "accessible public spaces and community institutions" and design that celebrates "local history, climate, ecology and building practice," says the Charter of the New Urbanism, the movement's defining document, ratified in 1996 by members of CNU, the Chicago-based Congress for the New Urbanism. (Available at www.cnu.org/charter.)

Interesting that one of the NU movement's founding fathers also is one of its prevailing skeptics.

"It's supposed to be mixed-use, and I think they got rid of that definition," says Kiki Wallace, developer of Prospect New Town in Longmont, considered by many nationally to be the cream of the cream of Colorado's NU communities.

A New Urbanist community, he says, "should have very close setbacks, detached garages, rear-loaded and out-loaded garages, narrow streets, townhouses, courtyard houses, detached houses and commercial with residential above it. And there should be a lot of little pocket parks."

Just building one huge park in the middle of the development doesn't cut it, Wallace says.

"That's just because they don't know how to design," he says. "They should have little intimate parks throughout the project--small parks, not just one big park or two big parks or a park on the edge. They should have parks with houses designed facing the parks."

Some degree of NU purity probably is a good idea if developers want to achieve serious energy savings. A decent rule of thumb is that household driving miles drop 20 percent to 30 percent every time population density doubles, as a 1990 study of odometer readings showed. This rule is subject to many exceptions, of course. Another odometer study indicated that as density doubled in Chicago, vehicle miles traveled fell 32 percent. As density doubled in Los Angeles, VMTs fell 35 percent; and as it doubled in San Francisco, VMTs dropped 43 percent.

The denser the better, evidently: The average American produces 24.5 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year. San Franciscans yield 11.2 metric tons of bad gases apiece. But New Yorkers account for just 7.1 metric tons per person, according to data introduced in April by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as part of his ambitious "PlaNYC: A Greener, Greater New York." The report said less energy is needed when buildings are smaller than the norm, shade each other (or are shaded), and are close to mass...