Making Heaven out of Hell: New Urbanism and the Refutation of Suburban Spaces

Abstract

Suburban sprawl has led to an array of problems including dependency on automobiles, neglect of cities, social stratification, and isolation. The increasingly popular movement known as new urbanism defines itself in opposition to suburban sprawl. It claims to recapture virtues of traditional neighborhood design in an attempt to create a built environment that reflects—and sometimes subverts—popular cultural premises. This essay examines the efforts of new urbanists to sell their ideas to consumers. The refutative enthymeme is a device often used to depict new urban developments as antisuburbs, providing a true alternative to suburbia. This essay analyzes new urban spaces along with advertisements, books, and articles describing and promoting new urban communities, and it explores the use of enthymematic reasoning in the production of identity and meaning for these communities. The result is a rhetoric of place that employs a postmodern, visual logos that produces spaces with a more communal identity without solving the problems associated with suburban sprawl.