New urbanism: recreating Florida by rewriting the rules.

• Author: Goldstein, Doris S.

An increasing number of Florida cities and counties re confronting the problems of sprawl--traffic jams, lifeless downtowns, environmental degradation, and sheer ugliness--and are seeking solutions in new urbanism, a land use planning philosophy that supports the development of compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities.

Florida is the birthplace of new urbanism. It has the first new urbanist community and the greatest number of new urban projects. (1) It is also the home of many of its leading advocates; the most well known of these, Miami architect and planner Andres Duany, was recently named by the National Organization of Homebuilders as the fifth most influential person in homebuilding today. (2) Although still a small share of the market, new urban communities command a premium over comparable homes in conventional subdivisions. (3)

New urbanism looks for its models to the towns and cities that were designed before World War II, particularly to the designs of land use planner John Nolen who did much of his work in Florida in the 1920s. (4) In the past, new urbanist developers faced significant regulatory hurdles, leading some observers to comment that our most beautiful and desirable historic districts would be illegal to build today7 Now, the principles demonstrated by these private developments are influencing the public process. Although obstacles to new urbanist development remain in some parts of Florida, a growing number of counties have been revising zoning codes to permit or encourage new urbanist development. Some municipalities and counties are even rethinking the concept of what a zoning code is and how it should work, replacing fundamental aspects developed during three-quarters of a century of Euclidean zoning (6) in favor of form-based codes.

New urbanism offers a different approach to both planning and real estate development, and brings with it a new vocabulary. It affects both the regulatory process and the drafting of covenants and restrictions. This article describes the principles of new urbanism as they have evolved to the present, the ways in which local governments in Florida have adopted its principles, and how new urbanist communities are organized and operated.

Evolving Language of New Urbanism

Although it did not yet have a name, new urbanism was born in Florida in 1982, with the beginning of construction of Seaside on the Florida panhandle, between Destin and Panama City. Unincorporated and only 80 acres in size, Seaside included almost all the elements of a small town. Today, it has homes, shops and restaurants, a charter middle school, a chapel, and even a cemetery.

Seaside demonstrates the principles of new urbanism: A mixture of uses and housing types with commercial uses clustered in the town center, well-designed, centrally-located parks and other civic spaces, small lot sizes with narrow frontage and the garage pushed to the rear of the lot, sidewalks, street trees, and a variety of other design elements intended to treat the streets as outdoor rooms and make it pedestrian-friendly. Narrower streets in a modified grid with more frequent intersections are safer and more pleasant for both pedestrians and drivers than a system of collector roads and cul-de-sacs. Perhaps counter-intuitively, such a system has the capacity to handle more traffic as well. (7) While the homes in Seaside and most other new urbanist communities (including Disney-built Celebration, near Orlando) have traditional architecture, the same principles have been applied to communities with contemporary architecture. (8)

The design principles exemplifled by Seaside were defined in the 1980s as traditional neighborhood development (TND) or sometimes, neotraditional development. (A transit-oriented development, or TOD, is a TND built around a mass transit station, so that residents can walk to the station and commute to work.) Although these terms are still used to describe particular types of developments, they have been absorbed into the broader term of new urbanism, coined in 1993 with the founding of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), an umbrella organization bringing together a variety of disciplines.

Broadening the Scope, Building Alliances

The principles exhibited by new urbanist communities--compact, mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly developments--are not limited to small villages like Seaside. Instead, the principles are now being applied to all types of developments, including downtown redevelopment. As one definition puts it:

New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods--the way communities have been built for centuries around the world. New Urbanism involves fixing and infilling cities, as well as the creation of compact new towns and villages. (9)

The Congress for the New Urbanism expands new urbanist principles further:

New Urbanists support regional planning for open space, appropriate architecture and planning, and the balanced development of jobs and housing. They believe these strategies are the best way to reduce how long people spend in traffic, to increase the supply of affordable housing, and to rein in urban sprawl. Many other issues, such as historic restoration, safe streets, and green building are also covered in the "Charter of the New Urbanizm," the movement's seminal document. (10)

To advance this far-reaching agenda, CNU has forged alliances with, among others, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which adopted new urban principles for rebuilding low-income housing under its Hope VI program, (11) and the Institute for Traffic Engineers, with which CNU is developing a new street design manual. (12) Even the Centers for Disease Control (13) and the American Public Health Association (14) see a link between sprawl and the obesity epidemic.

Both the goals and membership of the new urbanism movement overlap significantly with smart growth. The six founders of the CNU were all practicing architects and planners, while the smart growth network resulted from a joint effort in 1996 of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several nonprofit and government organizations. (15) As a result, smart growth tends to be more policy-oriented in its solutions while new urbanism tends to be design-driven. However, the two movements are allies and today their missions are almost interchangeable.

The American Planning Association has a new urbanist division, which declares its purpose "to provide planners, public officials, and other decision makers with the information, support, and tools needed to eliminate restrictive conventional development regulations and allow new urbanism patterns to...