THE NEW ELITIST URBANISM

 New Urbanism is a movement that I have heard different debates and opinions about, for it seems that some people are huge fans and some recognize the significant faults. I am more curious, however, about the urban fabric and form created under the guise of New Urbanism as the ideas, techniques, and approaches reference all sorts of best practices, but there's no mention of how these hubs should actually look. To me, new urbanism has a very traditional neighborhood form with a greater density and a few shifts in organization, but I question why the principles established would not work for very contemporary neighborhoods or even applied to co-housing projects at a large enough scale. From my perspective, new urbanism is not enough. Thinking about it as a sort of spectrum, on one end is rural life and suburbanization and on the complete opposite is high density urbanization, and new urbanism seems to fall somewhere in the middle. However, if we think about it in environmental terms to reduce some of our human impact, greater density and less development over as little land as possible is the ideal solution. And many of the ideas applicable to new urbanism philosophy is not that different in high-density environments. Versatile infrastructure is certain, incubator retail is possible, most buildings are mixed use, live-work units are common, most are agnostic to style, they still celebrate civic buildings, street geometry can be modified or even removed for pedestrians, there are plenty of techniques to work with nature, and pervious streets are perfectly plausible in synthesis with reduction of streets altogether. There are some tactics that would not work, but the majority of the philosophies could be implemented to high-density development and better reduce our footprint - not to mention provide significantly more available spaces and reduce some of the elitism that classifies new urbanist places. Perhaps we should develop a New New Urbanism.