Category Archives: New Urbanism

A Tale of Two Towns

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Kissimmee versus Celebration and the New Urbanism
[Excerpt From Chapter One]

“When you’re building your own creation,
Nothing’s better than real than a real imitation.”
-Lyrics from the song “Frankenstein,” by Aimee Mann

On the edge of two lakes about twenty miles south of Orlando are two small southern Florida towns. Both have old-fashioned main streets, with stores, restaurants, and a movie theater that open onto their sidewalks. Both have old-fashioned homes with front porches set on streets which lead into their downtowns. Both have parks that wrap around their lakes, where you can stroll and take in a sunrise or the night air. They both lie off a road called U.S. 192, and are just a few miles from each other.

But one of these towns is struggling. Its homes are not selling for much, and its storefronts have trouble staying full. The other town is a wealthy place, with homes that cost up to $1 million. Its downtown has rich boutiques and pricey restaurants.

The struggling town is called Kissimmee. It was founded in the mid-nineteenth century and grew as a shipping port and then a railroad and cattle town. But people stopped using the big lakes for shipping, and railroads became less important as well, and the town suffered.

The successful town is called Celebration. It is a new place, founded in 1994. It is, in reality, not a town, but a subdivision, built by the Disney corporation in conscious imitation of towns like Kissimmee. It sits next to a freeway and an exit ramp. Its homes are being bought by the Orlando upper classes, and its stores are being filled with tourists. It is an example of a much-heralded design philosophy called New Urbanism.

In learning why one town is struggling, and the other prospering, we can learn what people value, compared to what they say they value. We can also learn about what makes towns, and subdivisions, tick. We also learn about the concept and practice of community, which Celebration’s owners say they are reviving. By looking at Kissimmee, we can learn about Celebration, because Kissimmee is the thing Celebration is pretending to be–a small, Florida main-street-style town. What does it say when the imitation of something is worth more than the thing itself?

Comparing Kissimmee to Celebration shows where Disney has chosen to imitate the design of a small town, and where it has not. In some aspects, like front porches, Disney has chosen to exactly copy Kissimmee. In other aspects, like the way the towns govern themselves, it has chosen not to. What we find is that Celebration is a contemporary automobile suburb pretending to be a nineteenth-century town. And that pretense, like most pretenses, has a price.

By looking at Kissimmee and Celebration, we can learn about the general thrust of the design philosophy the latter represents, New Urbanism. It is probably the most heralded design movement of the last half-century. It has been embraced as a way out of the problems of sprawl. Celebration closely resembles other New Urban developments, both in the structure of its streets and the structure of its management, although it does differ in some respects. By looking at Celebration, and the thing it is imitating, Kissimmee, we start to see just where this New Urban path, as it has generally been configured, leads.

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Mrs. Mac’s versus Max’s

We can glimpse the distinctive characters of the respective “main streets” of Kissimmee and Celebration by looking at two eatery proprietors offering simple fare there. Kissimmee has a small restaurant on Main Street, called “Mrs. Mac’s,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. Celebration has a restaurant on Market Street, called “Max’s Cafe,” that serves sandwiches, hamburgers, meat loaf, and pie. One is a magical realist version of the other.

Mrs. Mac’s on Main Street in Kissimmee has Formica-topped tables that you might find in your kitchen, a nondescript floor, and a wooden checkout counter with a noncomputerized cash register. The menu is simple. Two grilled pork chops with three vegetables for $5.95. Steak for $6.95. Homemade chili for $1.50. At lunch, I watched a nonpicturesque group of people eat there: a fat woman struggling to control her three children, a businessman here and there. The food was austere but good.

Max’s Cafe in Celebration is to cafes what Celebration is to small towns: a fantasy version of a small Southern cafe. Max’s has venetian blinds with thick louvers in the windows, booths inside with metallic piping, and a long soda fountain. It’s really quite beautiful, although it comes at a price.

A bowl of chili at Max’s costs $5.95, compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A piece of pie costs $4.95 compared to $1.50 at Mrs. Mac’s. A cheeseburger is $7.50 compared to $2.70 at Mrs. Mac’s. And we don’t even want to get into the entrees. But the differences between the two places go deeper than the prices and decor.

The proprietor of Mrs. Mac’s in Kissimmee opens or closes when she pleases. Like the other property owners or lessors in Kissimmee, she is not under the thumb of a common management. The property under Max’s, however, is owned by Disney. Every store in Celebration serves at Disney’s pleasure and was handpicked by it. Celebration’s management is that of a shopping mall, not a town. Disney can adjust “the mix” of the stores to optimize profits, or character, or anything it chooses.

So why do the respective characters, not to mention prices, of these two main streets differ so remarkably?

Kissimmee’s Main Street was once its center, because the town itself was once a business and transportation center. It was natural for people to shop as they went to work, or got off the train, or took a boat down the lake. When the region’s center shifted away from the town, its Main Street dried up.

Celebration’s Market Street is no more of a center than Kissimmee’s Main Street is now. But it does do a better job of fostering that illusion, for reasons I will come to.

The business district of Celebration is a curious animal. To some extent, Celebration has succeeded in overcoming what has been the Achilles heel of New Urbanism, which is establishing a commercial center within a residential subdivision. Retail is an area where fictions are exposed. Successful retail establishments have basic needs, like traffic or pedestrian counts, that cannot be dressed up or swept aside.

New Urbanists blame zoning for the segregated uses embodied in the mall, the subdivision, and the isolated schools no one can walk to. But this puts the cart before the horse. Zoning, like most regulation, usually only tidies up decisions the marketplace and the physical infrastructure dictated. Neighborhood business districts were created by the necessity to have services within walking distance of one’s home. Before the nineteenth century, this was because feet were basically the only transportation for most people. To buy something, you had to walk there.

The advent of the streetcar and other forms of mass transportation changed that dynamic only somewhat. In their effects, streetcars and subways were to cities what guns are to violence: they were force multipliers. They made it possible for even more people to live in one place, and congregated businesses around streetcar lines and subway stops. Once they got home from work, people still walked to shop, visit a friend, or have a drink. They had to.

The car and the highway changed that. While mass transit systems were magnets, gathering people and businesses around central points, cars and highways were antimagnets, spreading things out as much as possible. Businesses that relied on customers with cars needed parking lots, which ate away at the street-based retail around them. Eventually, stores moved to the suburbs, where their parking lots could be as big as their owners liked. Stores got bigger and bigger because people could drive to them. So far, the country has not seen an end to this centrifugal dynamic, where businesses get larger and larger, and more and more isolated and spread out.

New Urban communities attempt to change this by resurrecting the old form of retail which existed prior to the automobile, or which was left over in its first few decades. They try to do this, however, without actually resurrecting the old transportation systems that made the old business districts possible and necessary.

To survive, retail needs an astonishingly large potential customer base, much larger than might be intuitively thought. The huge, 200,000-square-foot warehouse-style stores, like a Wal-Mart Supercenter, can require a customer base of a half million households within a twenty-minute drive.3 But even a small restaurant or pharmacy requires high traffic volumes, whether it be by foot or car. Traffic volumes depend on transportation systems. Wal-Marts are located around key freeway interchanges because it allows them access to a regional population base. A small store can succeed in an urban neighborhood, but it requires a lot of people going by its front door, the same as such a store in a strip shopping center out on the highway. To produce those traffic volumes, an urban storefront seems to need at least 10,000 families within walking distance, which means a gross density of at least ten homes an acre. Ghent, the century-old neighborhood in Norfolk where I live, has a gross density of close to twenty homes to an acre. Some individual blocks in Ghent, with larger apartment buildings, have double and triple this density. And Ghent still has difficulty supporting a retail street. In general, the denser the distribution of stores, the denser the distribution of people. Manhattan can support retail in almost every block because it can pack 10,000 people into one block.

This point has always confused architects. Retail is not their strong point. Le Corbusier, the modernist giant of the twentieth century, imagined that shops could be put into his tall towers and persisted even after it was shown that their population was not nearly enough to support the shops.4 Duany conceives of small shops within his low-density, neotraditional subdivisions even though they also lack the necessary population and density.

Celebration, even at buildout, has a density of less than two per acre. The densest part of Celebration is the Garden District, which has about five homes to an acre. These are the special, lower-priced homes, starting at $150,000, and so are off to themselves so they won’t contaminate the more-common $400,000 and $1 million homes in the rest of the community. The Garden District homes, which are 1,350 to 2,200 square feet, are often only six feet apart.5 At five homes to an acre, the Garden District has a crammed-together feel to it. I wouldn’t want to live there. I bet turning into your driveway at night could be a real operation. Yet the density here is still nowhere near high enough to support a business district.

So how is Celebration able to support a downtown?

In a book about the making of the Macintosh computer, Insanely Great,6 Steven Levy described the “reality distortion field” that workers said Apple founder Steve Jobs was able to create around him by the sheer force of his personality. Disney is able to create a similar reality distortion field around Celebration. Through the force of its marketing muscle, it is able to reverse the normal laws of retailing that demand that retail be placed around principal transportation arteries, be they suburban highways or subway lines. In the suburbs, this means placing retail on a heavily traveled main artery and putting big parking lots there to scoop the traffic off of it.

With Celebration’s downtown, you have to drive a mile on a winding access road off U.S. 192. This should kill any attempt at retail. But Disney is able to surmount this with the sheer force of its name and presence. Tourists and sightseers are being pulled off U.S. 192 by the publicity generated by the press and advertising. Disney has heavily advertised Celebration on local television as a place to go shop. Celebration also has its own exit sign on Interstate 4. It’s already listed on the one-page, low-detail maps that you get from the rental car companies.

All this is enough to bring a steady stream of traffic into Celebration to both look at the homes and walk around this novel creature, a “downtown” inside a subdivision. The tourist traffic is a twofer, for the tourists both support the stores and look at the model homes. (This has obviously caused some tension in the neighborhood. Many homes have small signs on them that say they are occupied, not a model home.)

Celebration’s downtown will only succeed if it is able to be not a neighborhood business district, but a regional shopping center. That is working so far. Most of their customers, store owners tell me, are tourists and home lookers. But because of this, the stores in the downtown are nothing like one would choose for a neighborhood shopping street. There are a fancy dress store, and upscale souvenir shops. There are restaurants, a grocery store, and a movie theater, but all extremely upscale. The Goodings market, a luxury chain in Florida, is a gourmet store. The manager says it originally tried to have a full produce and meat section. But the stuff wouldn’t sell. So it scaled back the produce and eliminated the fresh meat. What you have left is a fancy store that is convenient if you forget the bottle of wine, but is not for everyday grocery shopping.

The point is that the residents of Celebration are still utterly dependent on U.S. 192, and always will be. They drive there to shop for groceries. They drive to the Wal-Mart to buy some lawn furniture. They drive to the mall to buy a computer, a lamp, or almost anything essential.

The Demolition Man

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
MAY 1995

Metropolis writer Alex Marshall spoke to Andres Duany about his role in the controversial plan to bulldoze East Ocean View in Norfolk. At the time of the interview, the city had bought few houses and only a small amount of demolition had taken place. Planning officials gave Duany wide latitude in recommencling whether some homes or areas should be saved from demolition. For now, the bulldozers have been idled by a commission that ruled that the housing authority offered a property owner just half of what his property was worth. The authority is appealing, but if the ruling stands, it will drive up the cost of the project to the point that the development would have to proceed in stages, if at all.

METROPOLIS: You seem to be in the position of Baron Haussmann, who built his grand boulevards through the neighborhoods of nineteenth-century Paris. People are saying, “We love your ideas, but we don’t want our houses torn down.” What responsibility do you have to the people who now live in East Ocean View?

DUANY: I think it’s the ancient [question of the needs of the] individual versus the community. You have to find where to draw that line. And it’s very, very difficult to draw it. In this case, that work has been done. The Norfolk city council has made the decision and everybody is out.

METROPOLIS: The residents aren’t actually out yet.

DUANY: Well, the vote has taken place. Now we can see what the best community plan is and see who can stay and who cannot stay.

METROPOLIS: If your design gets built, are you concerned that your kind of urbanism will be less authentic than what exists there now?

DUANY: The neighborhood will still be mixed in income, but exactly the other way. Now it’s 95 percent rental and five percent owner. Under the new plan, it’s going to flip to be 80 percent owner and 20 percent rental. The scale will be healthier. Remember the statement that poverty does not cause crime. Poverty in concentration causes crime.

METROPOLIS: New Urbanism was founded in part as a reaction against urban renewal. Now you are participating in an urban renewal project.

DUANY: There’s a big difference between the neighborhoods that were wiped out in the 1950s, which were little Georgetowns, with darling houses and first-rate urbanism, and this stuff [the homes in East Ocean View], which is extremely exploitative. Even if I were most benevolent and broad-minded, I could save only 10 percent of the buildings. It’s not like [how it used to be done], where there were great places that were just misunderstood and demolished.

METROPOLIS: Do you ever wake up in a cold sweat at night and say, wait a minute, I’m involved in an urban renewal project?

DUANY: Well, I’ve never been involved in the side that causes demolition. I’ve always been on the repair side. I’ve actually resigned from projects because of not wanting to be involved in demolitions. I’ve been to charrettes in which contracts were signed and I just walked out the first day.

METROPOLIS: Where did this happen?

DUANY: In Houston, in an old black neighborhood. Actually, I quit because there was a very nice apartment building and some very nice 1940s housing. It was a total slum. But it was so beautifully designed that I thought it was of architectural value. Basically, at the end of the first day, I said, “Either you trust me to decide what stays and what goes, or you don’t.” And I walked. I was on the airplane the same night. But I’m in a very privileged position, because I have more work than I can handle. Most planners can’t do that. They have to eat.

METROPOLIS: Is it bad for your practice to be involved in a project that forces people out of their homes, even if you are doing so for the sake of better architectural quality?

DUANY: I suppose it is, yes. But it’s easy for me to say, “I didn’t do it.” The whole thing has been made so easy for me. I’ve been protected from this beautifully. Because [the city council made the decision] before I got here.

METROPOLIS: But you do have some misgivings about it?

DUANY: Well, I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say. But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because it doesn’t pay taxes. It bankrupts cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick here is to bring the middle class back to the city. The whole challenge is getting middle-class people to come in and live with lower-income people.

METROPOLIS: Is it possible to do some selective demolition and gradually bring the neighborhood up?

DUANY: I think the political reality was “Where do you draw the line?” Because all the people have terrific rights. Basically, [the planners] decided that if we’re unfair, we’re unfair to everybody. And that’s a form of fairness.

When The New Urbanism Meets An Old Neighborhood

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by Alex Marshall
This article first appeared in Metropolis
May, 1995

East Ocean View in Norfolk, Virginia, is a neighborhood on death row, awaiting execution by bulldozer. Residents are being forced from their homes to make way for a brand-new village designed by Andres Duany. If this sounds like old-fashioned urban renewal, well, that’s what it is. It employs the same logic: cities can be fixed by plowing down neighborhoods and replacing them with better buildings and wealthier folks.

The presence of Duany adds a twist. As a partner of Miami-based Duany/PlaterZyberk Town Planners, he is an acknowledged leader of the New Urbanists, the self styled white hats of contemporary architecture who seek to reform America’s wayward landscape. Their remedy is as much moral as it is aesthetic. They believe that traditional town planning – by which they mean a grid of streets lined with trees and front porches, studded with shops and parks – can heal the nation’s fractured sense of community. In East Ocean View, however, the New Urbanists’ championing of the ideal of community is being put to the test. In essence, Duany is now facing the same charges that smeared the Modernists he so disdains: Is it people he cares about – or buildings?

The drama is being played out in a city of a quarter million, the center of a metropolitan sprawl inhabited by 1.4 million. Over the last few decades, Norfolk has lost a third of its population, while the suburbs have boomed, tripling in size. Although the city has a huge commercial harbor, it’s still basically a Navy town, relying on the massive Norfolk Naval Base and related installations to pump dollars and jobs into the economy. For almost half a century, Norfolk has been looking for ways to stem the tide of white flight and bring the middle class back to the city. Since the early 1950s, huge chunks of the city have been bulldozed; many lots remain empty, awaiting private-sector investment that has never materialized. At the moment, the city is leveraged to the hilt in a variety of downtown renewal schemes, including a suburban-style mall supported with $100 million in loans and free infrastructure.

In East Ocean View, bungalows, duplexes, and brick apartment buildings sit on a grid of streets on a peninsula sandwiched by the Chesapeake Bay and one of its estuaries. For decades, people have speculated that it could be a prime piece of real estate. In late 1993, not without controversy, the Norfolk city council approved a plan concocted by the housing authority to purchase 100 acres. The bulldozers have already bit into a few of the roughly 350 buildings that make up more than 1,500 homes. The city hopes that a new neighborhood, aimed at the middle and upper classes, will both rid the city of social problems and help its tax base. It’s undeniable that the present neighborhood has its troubles. Prostitutes loiter at certain intersections; young men in bulky jackets handle a brisk drug trade with passing motorists. But as residents will tell you, it’s one of the few places in the Norfolk metropolitan area where a working-class family can afford an apartment within a block or two of the beach. It’s also one of the more integrated neighborhoods, about two-thirds white, a third black, mixed pretty evenly. The homes range from neatly tended to boarded-Lip and abandoned.

The locals include people like Barbara Caffee, who with her husband has owned a house there for 30 years and raised a family. Her small home includes a basement they added themselves, plus an addition where her mother lives. Caffee, who is president of the neighborhood’s civic league, says flatly that they won’t leave. “I would understand eminent domain if they were going to put in schools or roads,” she says. “But to take down our house to build a home for someone else? I don’t understand that.”

The Caffees are among the few home owners there. Most residents rent, including Claudette Durclen, a 27-year-old nurse’s assistant who shares an apartment with her eight-year-old daughter. Durden says her biggest concern about leaving is her daughter. “She has friends across the street, friends out back, and friends across the road,” the young mother says, pointing from her balcony. “It would be hard having to start all over.”

Duany’s design for East Ocean View sharply reduces the total population of the neighborhood, a paradoxical path for neotraditionalists, who usually extol the advantages and efficiency of high density. Instead of 1,500 homes, Duany’s village has between 400 and 600, ranging in price from $70,000 to $500,000 or more – beyond the reach of 95 percent of the current residents. The new streets and buildings are meticulously laid out and designed. In classic neotraditional styles, the proposed town houses and fancy homes sit close to the street, side by side. About the only things the plan retains from the existing neighborhood are the trees; they’re needed to lend the new development some character and to provide a windbreak against ocean breezes.

Since the city is not using federal money, it is not required to assist residents in relocation. The housing authority has promised three months of free rent, and will bump any resident who requests it to the top of the public housing waiting list. But the city has been quite explicit in its hopes that some of these people will just go away. When the housing authority first unveiled the project, it included an economic report estimating that roughly a third of the neighborhood’s citizens would leave town, thus saving the city money on social services and police.

The city council approved the project a year before Duany came to town. But partly because of the controversy, city officials looked to Duany for approval of their plans to tear down the neighborhood. One official described Duany as “the doctor” with ultimate authority to decide whether to save or amputate the “diseased leg.” During a week-long charrette held in a senior citizens center, Duany discussed saving a few homes, but decided against any guarantees. A completely clean canvas, Duany opined, was more valuable than saving homes for a few lucky people.

In the course of the charrette, Duany did not duck complaints from those being forced to move. Elderly couples sought him out, and he listened patiently to what they had to say. Then he explained why their homes had to be torn down to build a better, more beautiful neighborhood.

Duany’s argument rests on two main points, one financial, the other architectural. The most important consideration, he says, is that the new neighborhood would raise the city’s tax base. The sacrifice of low-income residents is for the common good of the city.

“I’d rather it wasn’t the case, I must say,” Duany says. “But on the other hand, affordable housing is not what cities need. Because they don’t pay taxes. They bankrupt cities. That’s the problem with Philadelphia right now. The whole trick is to bring the middle class back to the city.”

Of course, cities need stronger tax bases and new ways to stem the tide of middle-class flight. Many of the original urban renewal programs of the 1950s and 1960s were designed for that purpose. But there’s no evidence that such programs work any better now than they did then. Clear-cutting a neighborhood often exacerbates social problems by splitting up supportive relationships and scattering poor residents into new and unfamiliar surroundings. Sometimes, that means the streets. Some of East Ocean View residents are refugees from past urban renewal schemes. Now they face the same thing all over again.

Duany’s support for the project seems to clash with certain core values of the New Urbanists, many of whom are inspired by the philosophy of Jane Jacobs and her methodical critique of urban renewal, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Further, Duany’s New Urban vision for East Ocean View comes at the expense of what is already an urban neighborhood. It’s got a street grid, with a variety of building types and a mix of incomes. One of the city’s best restaurants, and virtually the only building likely to be spared, is in East Ocean View. The buildings are not all situated according to strict neotraditionalist tenets, but the basic parts are there. The neighborhood is urban not only in its buildings, but also in the way the community interacts. This is not some cul-de-sac haven of isolated citizens. It’s the kind of neighborhood where you see a group of friends in T shirts, their young children in tow, heading to the beach with a six-pack of beer to enjoy a summer afternoon.

Outsiders often express surprise that the city is pursuing such an old-fashioned strategy. But Norfolk is something of an anomaly, as David Rice, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, freely admits. “Cities lost enthusiasm for redevelopment in the Sixties and Seventies,” says Rice, almost boasting. “Except for Norfolk. We pressed on.”

It’s hard to see what advantage Norfolk has gained by this persistence. Likewise, it’s hard to tell how Duany reconciles his professed faith in urbanism with his actions in East Ocean View. His flip architectural assessment of the homes people are being turned out of seems narrow and ill considered. Cities are not defined by buildings alone; they are made up of an intricate web of relationships- physical, social, economic, cultural- that are rooted to places. The trouble with cities is that there are so many forces tearing these relationships apart. You would think architects would have learned by now to be healers, not wreckers.