The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community
by Peter Katz

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Book Reviews of The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community

Book Review: Milestone book quickly becoming coffee-table classic
Summary: 4 Stars

By starting the national conversation, the book has succeeded spectacularly, and continues to serve the purpose. With solid, workmanlike graphic design, it shows the way forward by depicting and decoding a handful of places both designed and built as successful alternatives to suburban sprawl.

Behind the scenes, the book became the flagpole around which a genuinely new intellectual movement rallied. At the time of publication, several of these projects were just on the drawing board. Today, only a few years later, over 150 such projects are blooming nationwide. New Urbanism today is the organizing question in the serious architecture and planning schools, in the development community, and in land-use "smart growth" politics. Developers are either running scared of it, or ripping it off, or putting big money into it. New Urbanism is a powerful set of ideas, and you can find them all here. This is the book that focused the disparate efforts of a score of highly talented, individualistic practitioners into a coherent beam. This is the book with the irrefutable visual argument in favor of building good places to live.

It is good, then, that the book's examples have been outrun. The book appears now almost quaint to those who, on the front lines of the land-use wars, have internalized New Urbanism's basic principles. The book is silent on, for example, the practical, tough, messy, political imperatives needed to reverse a half-century of mad sprawl. Reading "The New Urbanism", one would conclude that healthy places to live are bestowed as if by magic from the brow of one or another luminary planner. A second edition, incorporating successes and lessons learned, will be needed soon. The Playa Vista example in particular appears likely to vanish embarrassingly from the drawing board into the thin air where good ideas go.

However, the basic visual argument remains solid, almost timeless. I use the book constantly to introduce new allies to the cause and to silence critics. I recommend it to anybody interested in America's lousy excuses for cities, which are, after all, our civilization itself.

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