Vernacular Aesthetics Research Articles

The urbanist revision of development

Refashioning towns and cities to achieve a revitalized sense of ‘urbanism’ has gained popular momentum. Proponents hail this as one means of achieving a more sustainable urban spatial form and a greater sense of place and community responsibility. But is their particular vision of urbanization an innovative model appropriate to the twenty-first century or is it regressive nostalgia? To address this, the paper asks who is advancing the change, why, how and with what implications. Two advocate bodies are the Urban Villages Group in Britain and the Congress for New Urbanism in the USA. The paper details the origins, tenets and agendas of these bodies, and some of the questions that their alternatives raise. Three very different attempts at urbanist development are also outlined. Each clearly demonstrates the strong emphasis that these groups have on urbanist vernacular aesthetics, Utopian notions of community, mixed land use, mixed tenure, collaborative processes and promoter-based development. But other issues are also raised relating to the long planning processes involved, the extent of public funding required, the plausibility of replicating such development options, the effectiveness of the participatory process, the degree of nostalgia evident, and the innate social relations. The paper concludes that the instigators of urbanist change examined in this research are elite groupings within society who are seeking to preserve idealized aesthetic and social orders with an indulgent understanding of the complexity of the contemporary urban condition.