The following text was inspired by Alex Krieger’s presentation at the Seaside Symposium on the New Urbanism.

The architectural schools - the academy - has finally awoken to the blight on the American landscape that is suburban sprawl. The first act of consciousness has been to hack at the most visible target, the New Urbanism.

The New Urbanism is depicted as a problem, not a solution. It is presented as not new, not urban, inept, dangerous, mistaken, misapplied, unnecessary, ineffective, naive, retrograde, pandering, facile, cynical, and otherwise flawed. One may well conclude by the unanimity of condemnation that the New Urbanism is a threat to the academy’s prerogative as principal critic of the American environment.

Alex Krieger, Chair of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has marshaled a few of the usual criticisms. I will attempt to engage them in detail and in the interest of a comprehensive presentation, to add other concerns that he may consider unimportant, but that are nevertheless prevalent.

These critiques depend on a contempt for reality, research being unadvisable when it comes to judging the New Urbanism. These critics don’t study the plans and codes. They dispense with site visits, and they avoid contact with local inhabitants. They rarely read the seminal texts. While Krieger, at least, has read the Charter of the New Urbanism I have yet to meet anyone critical who has read Leon Krier’s Choice or Fate. As community design can hardly be judged from images, the absence of such research constitutes a serious breach of scholarship. The willful ignorance of the critique wounds only by the utter disrespect that it implies.

Criticism exuding such extreme unreality can only be indulged in term of fallacies. I will address each in turn.

The Fallacy of Sprawl: This argument against the New Urbanism is often summarized in the bumper-sticker slogan that it merely replaces suburban sprawl with New Urban sprawl. The power of this polemic lies in the infection of the doctor with the disease. To be effective, this argument requires ignorance. The counter-argument is therefore to state clearly that New Urbanist communities are compact; balanced in function; provide inclusive housing; support home-based business; have a spatially defined public realm; are pedestrian-accessible; relegate the car to special needs; are transit-supportive; and are built on infill as well as "greenfield" sites. These nine ways are the antithesis of sprawl.

The Fallacy of Infill: This critique states that New Urbanists should direct their efforts exclusively to the reconstruction of the existing urban fabric, arguing that to build on greenfield sites, even if creating authentic urbanism, is to undermine the city. This stricture is irresponsible. Ninety-five percent of what is built in this country is on greenfield sites. To ignore the urban edge will not slow the sprawl one iota. On the contrary, if the New Urbanists abdicate greenfield development, the sprawl will have rid itself of its only bridle.

New urbanists of course do work in the inner city, and very effectively. The list of projects is long. But the most significant contribution of NU has been to take the throwaway ingredients of suburbia: the office parks, the shopping centers, and the housing pods in order to amalgamate them into neighborhoods. These are the places for working, shopping, and dwelling that are the raw material of urbanism, not to be neglected by the design profession. The tragedy of postwar America is not just the condition of the inner cities, but the enormous amount of potential urban fabric wasted in sprawl.

The population of California grows at the rate of one Pasadena every year and one Massachusetts every decade. This force majeure cannot be accommodated as infill. Besides, even if the price differential between urban land and an immediately adjacent greenfield did not undermine controls, there is enough profit in that differential to affect the political process in the long run - and all true planning must be for the long run. It is a delusion to dedicate energy and resources to policies that will last but one political generation or succumb even sooner to legal challenge based on the elemental principles of property rights and equal treatment under law. It is far more durable to affect that which will inevitably be built so that it is worthy of the city.

The Fallacy of Density: It is a misrepresentation to state that the New Urbanism does not deliver adequate densities. Dan Solomon habitually reaches 50 units to the acre; Moule & Polyzoides at Playa Vista approach 40; and DPZ exceed 50 in suburban Plano. These are urban densities, comparable to those of Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. These densities are difficult to achieve, as the units must be provided with 1.5 parking spaces each, while none are required in Boston. Masking the cars from the urban frontages requires more cunning than the open parking lots of suburbia or the mere shaping ("morphomania" is Herbert Muschamp’s term) of the architectural object sufficient to the parking-exempt center cities.

However, Krieger is correct that many NU projects have a lower density. The reason is not the abdication of principle, but the application of the more complex criteria for housing that serves a variety of human needs and desires. Some are fulfilled by an urban apartment, and others by a house with a yard. The house with a yard in fact forms the major portion of the fabric of most of the American inner cities that Alex admires.

The necessary variation is not necessarily designed to accommodate racial or cultural preference as much as those of income and age. A rational response to various market segments has been developed by the housing industry into a science incomparably more accurate than academic speculation. The problem arises in suburbia, only when each segment is delivered as a segregated pod, often walled away from the others.

The NU requires inclusive housing with the range of options provided in close proximity within each neighborhood. Although this can reach very high densities in localized areas, fully inclusive housing averages about eight units to the acre (gross) to accommodate the varied housing needs of all people young and old, rich and poor, single and married, as well as providing a comprehensive system of open space in squares, plazas, greens, playgrounds and environmental greenways. Adding the required sites for shops and workplaces, as well as reservations for schools and other civic buildings, drops the statistical density. The accusation of low density is available only to critics who ignore the complexity of the NU model.

The Behavioral Fallacy: This is one that is played both ways. Most critics accuse the NU of erroneously claiming that the physical design of the public realm can affect human behavior. Others claim that "social engineering" is dangerous and a short step from the Holocaust. This is the Eisenman Gambit.

Architects who believe that physical design is incapable of affecting human behavior are seriously hampered in their powers of observation. The manipulation of behavior in a modern shopping mall is a conclusive example of this phenomenon, only recently described for the academy by Professor Margaret Crawford (who was aghast at the discovery!).

Architects often have difficulty allowing for this phenomenon, perhaps from inexperience in urbanism. Clearly, urbanism can affect behavior far more than an individual building. Economic conditions being equal, the difference in the life of two children, one having a cul-de-sac as his or her domain and the other having pedestrian access to an entire neighborhood, is obvious. A comparative visit to Kentlands and to the adjacent housing pod will demonstrate this.

Let us admit that blindness to behavioral determinants is not physiological; it is ideological, and endemic only among the current architectural avant-garde. This was not always so. The potential to affect human behavior was one of the defining premises of the modern movement. It was discredited only in the wake of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing estate in St Louis. If this grand amalgam of Ville Radieuse with HUD ideals failed, then surely one would have to conclude that design cannot affect behavior. Let architects therefore withdraw from incursions in fields not properly their own. Let architecture become autonomous, buildings affecting only the development of their art. This deduction signaled the birth of post-modernism. The avant-garde has now discarded the initial stylistic manifestation of post-modernism, but not the movement’s restricted field of action.

The correct conclusion from the failure of Pruitt-Igoe should have been that design has such a powerful affect on human behavior that it can transform, in very short order, a viable neighborhood society into a self-destructive one.

This power, since so ably documented by Oscar Newman and William Whyte, was thus abdicated to the mall developers, until the advent of the Congress for the New Urbanism. Accepting this inevitable power, and wielding it responsibly, is a key to NU success. Skeptics should study the astounding turnabouts of trashed housing when retrofitted by Ray Gindroz. These are successful field tests of the new Hope VI guidelines commissioned from the CNU by HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros.

The Fallacy of Controls: An aspect of the NU that many architects find exceedingly noxious is the widespread use of codes. Such controls "on creativity" are often considered fascist (a trivialization of the term). Where is the logic, when a single architect can design hundreds of repetitive units without reproach, while a NU architect decanting building design to others is reviled because of the proviso that they follow certain rules?

But let us begin with the reality of the situation. What dream world do these critics inhabit that they consider the current situation of design to be uncoded? Codes have been with us since the earliest towns on this continent. Extremely tight coding is in fact responsible for such urban icons as Commonwealth Avenue and Madison Avenue.

But are codes democratic? Categorically yes, in the sense that the rule of law and orderly processes are no less essential to democracy than the vote. Thomas Jefferson wrote codes. The capital city of the United States has codes. But Washington also has an additional control that is against NU practice: the design review board. Boards add an arbitrary aspect to the design process, and NU architects would rather play by the known rules of a code than be subject to the whims of a board.

The realistic alternative to the codes that are now pervasive is not their elimination, but rather their replacement by better ones. History shows the futility of attempting to dismantle bureaucracies. One can only affect change by changing the rules that a bureaucracy administers.

But beyond this reality, would codes be necessary at all? Certainly from the point of view of the citizen. The American middle class is by now so hard-wired that the production of architects can demonstrably lower the value of proximate buildings. They prefer the constraints of planned communities over the arbitrary rules of most older cities.

From the point of view of the NU, codes are necessary because a modicum of architectural harmony allows mixed use to be acceptable. When buildings share a common vernacular, it is possible to integrate them in great variety: apartment buildings, offices and shops can be adjacent without raising hackles. When typology must vary, syntax is a powerful camouflage. It is particularly useful for the insertion of low-cost housing into wealthier sectors.

In addition to establishing a shared grammar, NU codes consciously limit the expressive range of certain buildings. Only civic buildings are left uncoded in NU practice. A modicum of visual silence is required of private buildings to lend prominence to civic buildings. These, in turn, are encouraged to express the aspirations of the institutions they embody and the creative intent of their designers. The necessity of this dialectic is evident if one were to imagine Gehry's Guggenheim framed, not by the avenue of self-effacing Bilbao buildings, but by the hyperactive work of Gehry’s acolytes. It would be a comical scene indeed.

The Ethical Fallacy: There is a fundamental difference between a critical architecture and architecture of reform. Critical design clarifies or expresses a condition. Robert Venturi is its original practitioner and Rem Koolhaas its current master, Atlanta having replaced Las Vegas as the poster child of hip urbanism. Koolhaas has recently conceptualized suburban sprawl as a sort of runaway train at full speed, powerful, dangerous, and exciting. His critical response, to quote Dan Solomon, is to plant his flag on it. The New Urbanists in contrast, are dedicated to the laborious task of reforming the trajectory of sprawl so that it does less harm to the society and the ecology through which it hurtles.

The very notion of reform is, alas, firmly outside the academy’s relativistic discourse, where all tracks are presumed equal. But the New Urbanism has an ethic, put forth in its Charter, that is judgmental about problems of environmental degradation and social equity. Take, for example, the new drive-through restaurant by Machado and Silvetti that was recently praised in architectural periodicals. At no point was it noted that for an ordinary lunch, this typology requires access to a car. Never mind that a car is an environmentally noxious device or that this restaurant is intrinsically inaccessible to that 50% of Americans that are unable to drive. This segregation should be repugnant to critics. But obviously, their apparatus is attuned only to the cosmetics of the object, oblivious to its social or ecological repercussions.

One positive contribution that Krieger grants is that the New Urbanism has catalyzed a real debate on urban planning. The academy was under the illusion that it had engaged modern urbanism, but its critique now seems conservative, posing the problem of aestheticizing "unprecedented" realities. Absorbing the streamform highway as a formal device is nothing more than the last of the series of "engineering envies" that have distracted architects for 150 years.

The Fallacy of Governance: The brilliantly conceived term of accusation, laden with irony and paranoia, is "private government". The implication is that NU communities, by being administered as associations, are permitted to withdraw from the travails of the Republic. There are actually over 160,000 such associations in the United States. They range from the co-ops of urban apartment buildings and the merchant associations of the Main Street Program to the tough new management districts of New York City.

In suburbia, such associations vary in effect, depending on their substance. Many are indeed too controlling in their details, and most are structured to assure a stasis that ultimately strangles authentic urbanism. So conceived, they tend to destroy character and stifle the organic evolution of the human community, but there is nothing intrinsic about them that makes them so.

The New Urbanists take the reform of these governments seriously. They are considered the software of community, perhaps as important as the hardware of the physical design. Even early NU communities (such as Kentlands) are equipped with innovative association documents that foster a sophisticated participatory democracy. They include not only the vote, but also the possibility of individual leadership, and they provide for the appeal of decisions made. The case can be made that these associations are fairer and more responsive to citizens than many municipal governments.

These associations are entered only by contract. To participate does not constitute a secession from county, state, or Federal government, as the critics would have one believe. Associations are in fact an additional level of government, willingly engaged, locally administered, legislated to a higher degree of specificity, and with more recourse for the citizen than municipal government is likely to provide. If well conceived, these associations are closer to the New England town meeting than many inept and authoritarian municipal bureaucracies.

An unbiased report on Celebration New Town would demonstrate that the rights of the citizens there are substantial. An example: the Main Street retail is not profitable, but the association will not permit it to be tied into the Disney tourist trajectory, although this would make it instantly profitable. The members of the association correctly perceive that tourists would destroy their sense of community.

The Elitist Fallacy: This mistaken concept involves two old red herrings. One is that minorities are not to be found in NU communities. The other is that the housing is expensive.

The short answer to the first is that Hispanics and African-Americans are indeed living in NU communities, providing that the regional demographics includes them. It would take much more than behavioral science to affect an ethnic resettlement of the order demanded by some critics. A more realistic discussion would acknowledge that such groups prefer to live with their own kind. One can establish a potential for the "correct" proportion of minorities to live in any given NU community, but only a command economy would hold this as an attainable ideal.

A more subtle theory (yet unproven) is that some minorities, having just escaped the rigors of city life, still see suburbia as their goal. They have not yet been disappointed by its failed promise and therefore do not see the appeal of the New Urbanism. If this theory is true, then it is only a matter of time...

The second accusation, that NU communities are more expensive than comparable ones, can be true, but it is not intrinsic. While they do not necessarily cost more to build initially, they usually do sell for more eventually. Even when originally affordable, they become expensive. Seaside in Florida had house-lots that once sold for $18,000. The fact that appreciation has exceeded 25% per annum is not the fault of Seaside; it is due to the mediocrity of the competition. Any commodity that is better and scarce tends to be driven up in price by the law of supply and demand.

A common and naive suggestion offered by academics is that the resale price of the affordable housing must be controlled. This is unfair and simply constitutes a reversion to the command economy. Why should the poor not reap the benefit of an intelligent real estate investment, while the wealthy are allowed to do so without limit? The only permanent solution to the problem of high cost is to make NU communities widespread. Only then will the pressure on prices be relieved.

The Demographic Fallacy: This notion is otherwise known as the Leave it to Beaver Syndrome. The common accusation is that the American nuclear family is gone, that the new demographic profile is substantially single-parent and therefore not well served by the "nostalgic" NU model. The monoculture of single-family housing is in fact, the standard of conventional suburbia, not of the New Urbanism. Indeed, the CNU constantly reminds us that the house dependent on the automobile does not serve the half of the American population that does not drive, let alone the single parent household. It does not serve the standard working couple either; not just because "there is no wife home to enjoy it in the daytime," but because their children can go nowhere without a parent. The "soccer mom" is the current euphemism for the parent as chauffeur for the child.

Nor does suburbia serve senior citizens, as they gradually lose the ability to drive and must therefore resettle to a retirement community where ordinary needs are institutionally provided. There were no retirement communities prior to suburban sprawl. There was no need for them as old people could get to their daily needs within the proximity provided by a neighborhood structure. Sociologist call a surviving neighborhood a N.O.R.C., a "naturally occurring retirement community."

In fact no one is particularly well served by suburbia. It is for this reason that the NU charter specifies inclusive housing in a mixed-use matrix. Inclusivity, by definition, requires provision of the apartments, townhouses, backyard cottages, and live-work units to serve all types of people except, possibly, the pathological profiles envisioned by academia!1

The NU assembles the single-family house (when it is provided) into neighborhoods and then into regional structures that support transit. That light rail is gaining in credibility nationwide is due in some measure to Calthorpe, Kelbaugh, and Lieberman’s clear and practical conceptualization of Transit Oriented Development (T.O.D.).

The Fallacy of Nostalgia: Architectural critics may be unable to register anything beyond the cosmetic. They seem unable to discern that the nostalgic-looking production housing is actually the result of a hyper-efficient industrial-distribution complex that delivers building elements as an open-ended prefabrication system. Interchangeable columns are available from dozens of manufacturers, integrating automatically with standardized moldings, trim, rationalized windows, doors, cabinets, hardware, wall cladding, fencing, gutters, chimneys, and all the rest. This is all available from open stock and meant to be assembled (if necessary) by adhesives and nail guns.

How does this production compare with that of a representative avant-guardist like Steven Holl, meticulously handworking with his ironmonger to achieve a certain surface with a rasp, just so; or personally masking a singular plate of glass for acid etching? Not to demean a consummate artist, but which method of production is that of a modern architect?

And how does one compare the archaic, elitist, fetish of exquisite drawing to create a single building, when the NU has hundreds of sets of construction documents rationalized and ready for FedEx delivery? These buildings are good, typical housing available for less than one-fiftieth the cost of the fee of the current young master.

Objectively, it would seem that the architecture of the NU is well suited to Gideon's "problem of large numbers," one of the constituent facts of the modernism. The fussy arts-and-crafts "materiality" of the avant garde is as Luddite as Ruskin was in his time, or worse, having been sustained for an additional century!

What can be discerned about the commitment to the "modern project" by comparing the respective discourses? How does Harvard's own design magazine Assemblage, compare with the publications of the New Urbanism?

The New Urbanists concentrate on mass communications: technical manuals, codes, periodicals, pamphlets, internet downloads, and crossover books. The medium may well be up to date but the message is archaic (say the critics): the level of certainty is redolent of the eighteenth century. But to the CNU, association with the Enlightenment is not a criticism. The last flowering of the Enlightenment in America, the Progressive Movement, after all was largely responsible for the livability of the cities that Krieger reminds us are worth caring for.

But even if the Enlightenment ethos is born of the eighteenth century, it is sheer innovation compared to the disquisitions appearing in Assemblage. These are reminiscent of nothing so much as medieval theological tracts. Indeed, speculation on the arrangement of angels sharing the head of a pin would be a concrete discussion in the context of that publication. That such discourse requires a world of its own definition is not without consequences. One hesitates to begrudge professors’ their stimulating mind-games, but they are debilitating to students, utterly dissipating the raw energy of youth that society requires for its renewal.

Krieger and the old urbanists are in fact the nostalgic ones, pining for the old urban cores. These are worthy of curatorial care, but are not representative of anything but the remnants of a bygone era. What in fact, is Krieger’s proposal other than refurbishment and preservation? That, and that the New Urbanists should cease their activity to give the inner cities a chance? (Note how architectural academics constantly have recourse to a command economy.) What could be more stultifying? Where is a proposal even remotely as challenging as the syncretic New Urbanist proposal that Krieger sardonically describes as "the best of everything." Why should the human environment settle for anything less? Failure and mediocrity, chaos and ugliness take care of themselves. They do not need the best minds (and Rem Koolhaas’ apologia) to protect their continued existence.

Why, despite the keenness for diversity, and the admiration for the random, is the architecture of the current avant garde so syntactically consistent? (Each of Peter Eisenman’s projects is a declension on a morphology.) Why, among the many possibilities, is the drawing of a symmetrically pitched roof forbidden at the GSD?2 Why is it impossible to find a figural urban space in a Harvard or Yale studio?3 Why have Leon Krier and Colin Rowe been, not merely apostatized, but airbrushed out of history?

The puritanism that Deconstructivism ("Decon") has absorbed in its senecense cannot possibly harbor the elemental inconsistencies easily absorbed by the standard U.S. housing product. Take the truly unprecedented typology of the Georgian manse ornamented with high-density polyurethane cut by industrial robots, attached to a three-car garage, with an "exploding" (developer’s term) spatial interior packed with the highest-tech appliances. That pushes the envelope! Zaha Hadid’s fire station is a prissy old thing by comparison.

The New Urbanists are indeed allergic to nostalgia. The CNU is committed to the improvement of mass-produced housing with standardized components. It is prepared to engage the mass culture of the American middle class. It is absorbing the most modern techniques of marketing, communication and financing. Indeed, some of its members are attempting to harness the huge capital flows of the secondary mortgage market. The only thing old-fashioned and nostalgic about the CNU is the holding of principles and nurturing the possibility of attaining them.

The Fallacy of Style: But at the heart of the academy's contempt for the New Urbanism is what Krieger calls its "retrograde" architectural syntax. This variable, however, is not under the control of the New Urbanists. It is the transaction of the people, the democracy of the consumer.

A consumer in America is the determinant of the design of all mass-produced artifacts, exercised through selective purchase. (The inability to abide the concept of "the consumer" is an important qualification for employment in the academy.) There is a common confusion regarding the nature of the architectural consumer, as there are actually four classes: the patron, the client, the customer, and the victim.

Patrons are architectural sophisticates who commission buildings as conscious works of art. They are willing to put up with additional costs, certain discomforts and some brickbats in support of the designer’s conception. Patrons permeate architectural periodicals as they are behind most of what is best. Patrons are rare, but since they are geographically concentrated near the avant garde meccas of New York and Los Angeles, it is easy to think that their number is greater than it actually is. Note how quickly the patron class drops away by Philadelphia or Irvine latitudes.

The second type of consumer is the client. Clients are not so much sophisticated as savvy. By making themselves available for contact with architects during the design process, they acquire a modicum of sophistication. The resulting buildings can be quite good and sometimes excellent. Clients underwrite most of the decent houses in America. Sometimes an individual within government will rise to the level of client.

The third type, the customer, is the most common consumer of housing and the stock-in-trade of the New Urbanism. The customer has no contact with the designer. He or she (usually) arrives at a decision to acquire a dwelling in a state of innocence at best, but more usually having been manipulated through the experience of comparison shopping. Only lightly attuned to the rigors of architecture, a customer is vulnerable to kitsch. Since this option is usually provided competitively in the vicinity, it tends to undermine serious architecture. This situation is exacerbated because most "good" architects disparage, shun, and remain ignorant of this huge stratum of housing, just as they have been taught to do in the architecture schools.

The fourth kind of consumer is the victim, the one with no choice in housing. Due to limited income or a very tight housing market, victims are grateful for any place of their own. They will accept good or bad housing. The absence of choice is one of the reasons that affordable housing such as Michael Pyatok’s can be so good, and why Dan Solomon’s projects in the supertight market of San Francisco can be austerely elegant. Such quality is not just a matter of talent, but of a consumer that has little choice in the matter. Some lucky victims are forced to accept very good housing that they will surely grow to appreciate, even if they would not have chosen to do so in the first place.

The patron, the client, and the victim are the consumers of decent architecture. But New Urbanist practice, by definition concerned with mass housing, takes on the difficult and problematic customer.

The question must still be raised of why, among the many "styles" possible for housing, the modernist ones are so disliked by the American customer. It is surely not because modernism is incapable of being a supple and interesting language. Modernist buildings can express myriad concepts: the internal workings of a building, or the method of its assembly, the environmental responsiveness of its skin, its exquisite materiality, or its clever joinery. The modernist language has even been known to express weightlessness, fascism, socialism, irony, cubism, the machine aesthetic, delight, various pathologies, and linguistic theory.

The problem with modernist architecture is that all these communications are intelligible only to those with training. Each language is closed and self-referential. Traditional architecture, on the other hand, communicates in the vernacular of human experience. Anyone can look upon a window, a balcony, a loggia, an arcade, or a belvedere, and can easily inhabit it in the mind. The communication is based on the common human experience of posture and prospect.

A higher level of communication may even be possible, that of the building as an intelligible composition. This too is informed by a universal experience, the visceral one of weight borne down to the ground. Brackets, columns, pilasters, thickened walls, or reasonable cantilevers are elements with which most humans can empathize as gravity resisted.

The language of traditional architecture communicates in intelligible ways. It is thus the only prospect of integration in architecture to the increasingly assertive democracy of the marketplace. The CNU fervently believes that the vernacular language of architecture must still be studied regionally, be made energy-efficient, liberated from kitsch, and restored to durable tectonics, but not that it can be condemned out-of-hand.

Conclusion. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the criticisms raised by the academy is that not one of them coincides with the set of concerns voiced by the development industry, a group no less opposed to the New Urbanism.

Since the power lies so obviously on the side of the developers, why should the Congress of the New Urbanism, in its seventh year, even bother to engage the academy in debate? There would be no reason to do so were the academy not so overtly instilling in its students ill will towards the New Urbanism. In so doing, they divert design talent away from some of the most important issues of our time. This pernicious activity should not continue unchallenged.

1 See any issue of Assemblage
2 Max Scogin admitted this to me in November 1995 at the GSD.
3 Alex Krieger and Alan Plattus did not challenge this statement made directly to them in September 1998 at Seaside