Key points
- New Urbanism emerged in the 1980s as a response to the car-centred city and uncontrolled expansion.
- In Suburban Nation, Duany and Plater-Zyberk criticise suburban sprawl and its social and environmental effects.
- The mixed-use neighbourhood — housing, shops and offices together — lets daily life happen on foot.
New Urbanism is a planning movement born in the United States in the 1980s as a critical response to the city built around the car and to uncontrolled expansion, or sprawl. It proposes compact, walkable, mixed-use communities to improve quality of life and sustainability. Against traditional zoning, which separates the city's functions — residential, commercial, industrial — it defends a design that integrates them into more inclusive and liveable neighbourhoods. Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, founders of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1993, are its main theorists and practitioners.
Suburban Nation: the case against sprawl
In Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000), written with Jeff Speck, Duany and Plater-Zyberk criticise unchecked suburban expansion and its consequences: car dependence, congestion, social isolation and the public cost of maintaining dispersed infrastructure. They propose instead a design that prioritises walkability and easy access to essentials — schools, shops, public spaces — and argue that compact communities not only reduce the need for motorised transport but generate a sense of community and belonging that the cul-de-sac never produced.
Mixed-use neighbourhoods
The mixed-use neighbourhood is the central piece. Where housing, shops and offices coexist within a short distance, land is used more efficiently and people can run their daily lives without depending on the car. That arrangement favours active mobility, walking or cycling, cuts emissions and improves health; and it contributes to the neighbourhood's economic and social vitality by multiplying interactions between neighbours. It is Jane Jacobs's lesson turned into a design code that a developer can follow.
Public space and walkability
Accessible, welcoming public space is the other key. Duany and Plater-Zyberk stress the importance of squares, parks and well-designed streets that invite social life: spaces centred on people rather than cars, safe and pleasant for walking. Narrower, tree-lined streets with wide pavements, buildings aligned to the street and parking behind rather than in front are the details that make a neighbourhood walkable.
Sustainability: fewer cars
The movement also carries a commitment to environmental sustainability. By reducing car dependence and encouraging public transport and cycling, it helps mitigate climate change; compact, dense communities use less energy because short distances between homes and services eliminate long and frequent trips. The integration of green infrastructure, green roofs or community gardens, completes the model in new or renovated neighbourhoods.
New Urbanism thus proposes a more compact, walkable and sustainable city against the problems of sprawl and car dependence. Its critics point out that many of its projects — Seaside, Florida, the first, in 1981 — have been new, expensive developments rather than transformations of the existing city, and that traditional aesthetics sometimes weigh more than social mix. Even so, its principles of mixed use and walkability have entered mainstream planning and are now common sense in half the world.
Frequently asked questions
What is New Urbanism?
An urban planning movement born in the United States in the 1980s as a critique of the city built around the automobile. It proposes compact, walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods with quality public space, recovering the form of the traditional town.
What does Suburban Nation argue?
The book by Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck criticises unchecked suburban expansion — sprawl — and its consequences: car dependence, isolation and the loss of community life. Against it, it defends the traditional neighbourhood, dense and mixed.
