   [Provided by permission of Alex Marshall]

   SUBURB IN DISGUISE

      In May of this year, the Third Congress of New Urbanism
      adopted a charter, declaring, "The Congress for New
      Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the
      spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by
      race and income... loss of agricultural lands and
      wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage
      as one interrelated community-building challenge."  But
      are planners and developers really creating cohesive and
      environmentally sensitive towns from scratch, or are
      they just selling houses? 

   by Alex Marshall


   A grand fraud is being perpetrated in America. Across the
   country, developers and planners are selling repackaged
   subdivisions as "new urban" communities. Billed as the
   modern equivalent of Charleston, Georgetown, and "Our Town"
   all rolled into one, these are supposed to be places where
   people of all backgrounds will be magically freed from
   their chaotic, car-dependent lifestyles to reunite in
   corner cafes along civic squares and lead healthy public
   lives.

   Also known as neo-traditionalism, New Urbanism is the
   much-hyped theory that planners can create cohesive
   communities by building subdivisions-though that word is
   never used-that resemble traditional towns or big-city
   neighborhoods. To do that, AT LEAST IN THEORY, streets are
   laid out in grids (some are modified) without cul-de-sacs,
   garages are tucked into alleys behind homes positioned
   close to the street and to each other, housing types and
   prices are varied, and street-level retail turns up in or
   near residential neighborhoods. At Kentlands, a planned
   community in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., this
   strategy is meant to create what the sales brochure calls
   "the old town charm of Georgetown and Annapolis...in
   western Gaithersburg."

   It sounds good. But while the virtues of the traditional
   city or town may be desirable, they cannot be replicated on
   empty land at the edge of town, where most of these
   developments are being built. This is not a matter of New
   Urbanism being right or wrong, but of understanding what is
   possible and what is not. Cities, even when drawn by a
   single hand-like Washington or Paris-take shape in the
   context of larger economic and social forces. Reproducing
   traditional cities, or saving the ones we have, would
   require re-creating the conditions and systems that
   produced them. This may be desirable; but it is a
   sociological  and political question, with real economic
   consequences, that New Urbanism avoids.

   New Urbanism is fast becoming the new standard for suburban
   development. Zoning boards and city councils around the
   country are demanding that new subdivisions conform to this
   idea, or at least to some of its superficial aspects. An
   avalanche of magazine and newspaper articles, books, and
   television shows preach that New Urbanism will save us from
   our suburban sins. But these new subdivisions cannot cure
   the ills of sprawl. They are sprawl.

   A WALK AROUND KENTLANDS

   Montgomery County, Maryland, is a clean, rich, and
   antiseptic domain similar to other suburban counties around
   Washington, D.C. Its boulevards are sweeping, and the newer
   ones are kept clean of commercial development. Strangely
   shaped office buildings tower over manicured lawns. A
   health club visible from Interstate 270 resembles a Las
   Vegas casino, with cantilevered floors and plenty of neon
   and spotlights.

   Kentlands grows out of this familiar landscape, wedged
   between Route 28 and Route 124, former country roads that
   now bristle with subdivisions, shopping centers, and the
   like. The Darwinian world of hyper-development is visible
   along the main roads, where clusters of knee-high paper
   signs on wooden stakes bloom like wildflowers, entreating
   drivers to steer their cars into newly built subdivisions:
   "Fountain Hills," "Quail Overlook," "Timberbrook Condos,"
   "New Models!" "King's View," "Prices Starting in the low
   200s!" 

   Kentlands itself takes up 350 acres and will eventually
   accommodate 1,500 families; close to three-quarters of that
   number are there now. Still in marketing mode, the
   development is festooned with builder billboards and small
   signs directing visitors to the "Upper Lake District."

   Kentlands was designed by Miami-area architects Andres
   Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who have been the
   central architects and missionaries of the New Urbanist
   movement. Begun in 1988, Kentlands was one of the first
   neo-traditionalist developments planned by their firm,
   known as DPZ, after the completion of the much-written-
   about Seaside in Florida.

   Although the designers faced a distinct set of challenges
   and restraints here, Kentlands' layout resembles DPZ's
   usual style in the way the streets, homes, and community
   buildings are placed. Gently skewed residential streets are
   grouped on each side of a central avenue, Tschiffley Square
   Road. The streets form an "urban grid" only in a very loose
   sense;  Kentlands turns out to be as confusing as any
   cul-de-sac subdivision. (A clerk at a gas station near
   Kentlands identified it as "the place with the confusing
   streets.") The residential buildings -- a mix of town
   houses, condominiums, and big, squarish homes-sit close to
   the street. The Rachel Carson Elementary School lies just
   inside the main gate. A shopping center, Kentlands Square,
   is on the other side of the development, while a group of
   lower priced condos, Beacon Square, occupies its own pocket
   near it.

   Gabrielle Stevens, an environmental scientist, took me on
   a walk around Kentlands on a chilly spring day. She and her
   husband live in a much-photographed row of houses on a
   central square near the old Kentlands farmhouse, now a
   community center. Originally from Nob Hill in San
   Francisco, one of the best urban neighborhoods on Earth,
   they moved here in 1992. They chose Kentlands rather than
   Washington's Georgetown, Adams Morgan, or Dupont Circle,
   which might have offered an East Coast version of their
   former home, in order to be near their jobs and to avoid
   the threat of crime in Washington. And Stevens loved the
   idea of what Kentlands offered -- an urban environment in
   a  natural setting.

   But that changed as the reality of Kentlands failed to live
   up to Stevens' ideal. She was disappointed when she saw
   trees pulled down around "Inspiration Lake" at the center
   of Kentlands, and even more so when she learned that the
   500-acre parcel of land adjacent to the development,
   originally owned by the National Geographic Society, had
   been sold to developers. (It is scheduled to become a
   subdivision called Lakelands, with construction beginning
   as soon as next year.) Stevens admits that sales agents
   never said her home would be the last built or that she
   wouldn't have neighbors sharing her walls, but she
   complains that her narrow row house now seems dark and
   lacks privacy. The scale and the density of the place are
   greater than she imagined. From her back patio, she pointed
   to a line of fences stretching down the alley. "You see,
   this is getting into the ghetto-clothesline thing."

   "There is no one to blame for the lack of internal space,
   we knew what we would be getting into," Stevens say. "We
   knew development would happen. But when homes replaced
   trees, the absence has just made an amazing difference. The
   scale is a lot larger in size, and density is more than I
   ever imagined. That may not be the fault of the plan, but
   of my ability to imagine what was going to be here. It's
   not that I hate it here, it's that it had so much
   potential, and I'm not sure it's living up to it."

   What's interesting about Stevens' complaints is that they
   are essentially suburban. Kentlands does not meet the
   ideals of isolation, privacy, and the illusion of being
   nestled in nature. It is too urban for her. The people who
   do love Kentlands feel that way because it is still
   fundamentally suburban, with just a taste of urban
   qualities. They like their neighborhood because it is
   protected from the outside world, sealed off from traffic.
   It is safe and walkable, the neighbors are nice, and the
   clubhouse pool is right down the street.

   David and Sue Goldberg live a few streets over from
   Stevens, in a big square brick home on a small lot with
   little front and back yards. It's about twice the size --
   and cost -- of Stevens' town house. The Goldbergs moved
   here two years ago from a six-bedroom home with a pool on
   1.5 acres in a semirural subdivision. By comparison,
   Kentlands is very urban indeed. The Goldbergs find it safe,
   social, and pedestrian-friendly. "We made more friends here
   in two months than we did in the other place in 10 years,"
   David says. "People here want to be social. And it feels
   very safe. I walk my dog late at night and don't give it a
   second thought."

   Sue Goldberg says she and her husband represent a category
   of homeowners who "have done the big yard thing and are
   tired of it." Neither Stevens nor the Goldbergs sought an
   actual urban environment, nor did anyone else I met in
   Kentlands. They did not want outsiders in their
   neighborhood, nor commerce or traffic. The Goldbergs liked
   Kentlands' "urbanism," but only in comparison to living in
   a semi-wilderness.

   Kentlands makes little sense without understanding suburban
   development in Montgomery County and elsewhere in the U.S.
   The essence of post-World War II development patterns is
   the old country road, from which sprout subdivisions and
   shopping centers. Tracts of housing, and eventually malls
   and office towers, are laid out as appendages to the main
   road, which quickly becomes congested and swells from two
   lanes to four and often eight lanes. This pattern of
   development did not emerge from the edicts of Le Corbusier
   or Frank Lloyd Wright; it happens because it suits a
   transportation system based around the car. Corbu, Frank
   Lloyd Wright, and the other anti-urbanists did not cause
   suburbia. They merely predicted it.

   Kentlands does not really change this suburban pattern.
   Like many other subdivisions, it sits on an amoeba-shaped
   parcel of former farmland and has only one or two principal
   entrances. Its average density -- a little over four homes
   to an acre -- is only slightly higher than most suburbs.
   And Kentlands conforms to the suburban pattern of
   isolation; it holds itself apart from the commercial
   services along nearby Great Seneca Highway.

   Neo-traditional planners claim that these developments are
   significantly more "environmental" -- that they consume
   less land and have a lighter impact on their site-than
   conventional suburbs. In fact, Kentlands' environmental
   track record is only marginally better than the suburbs
   that surround it, although its plan responds to the site's
   features more than most. Common open space takes up some 50
   acres, about a sixth of the site, and is laced with
   wetlands. Preservation of these areas helps to maintain
   natural drainage patterns and what remains of the site's
   animal and plant species. And landscaped spaces (although
   not private yards) are groomed without the typical chemical
   fertilizers and pesticides. But to assess the real impact,
   it helps to look at what was there before. Kentlands was
   built on what had been part of a wildlife refuge
   established by the subdivision's namesake, Otis Beall Kent.
   (The refuge also extended into the former National
   Geographic property.)

   When planners talk about how New Urbanism contributes to
   environmental sustainability, they are also referring to
   the reduced dependence on the car that the density of these
   developments supposedly makes possible. Just like residents
   of "real" urban neighborhoods, people in developments like
   Kentlands are theoretically able to walk to the store, to
   their friends' homes, to the community center. Though
   studies about how much driving is really taking place have
   not been conducted, DPZ architect Mike Watkins, who works
   on-site at Kentlands, offers his own informal example.
   "Kids walk to school here," he says. "The state of Maryland
   spends $400 per year per student on busing; 100 kids
   walking to school here equals $40,000 -- which could hire
   two teachers." He says high school kids without cars can
   work at the shopping center, but acknowledges they often
   need to drive to other activities in the Gaithersburg area.
   People might walk within their neighborhoods, but the
   common rhythms of suburbia-the cycle of extensive
   automobile use and miles of development on the fringe of
   town-are still in place.

   Like many other residential developments, Kentlands
   maintains a homeowners' association [hoa] whose rules
   control the look of the place, and to some extent the
   behavior that takes place there. Buying a home
   automatically makes the owner a dues-paying member of the
   association who agrees to abide by certain restrictions to
   which only the association can grant exceptions.  These are
   classic tools of suburbia that provide a level of control
   often unavailable to local governments. Kentlands' group is
   called the Citizens Assembly, as if this private
   association were the equivalent of a New England town
   meeting.

   The Kentland's hoa controls the usual thing hoa's do -- the
   color of your house, the management of common spaces -- but
   adds a few touches peculiar to a new urbanist development.
   The Kentlands citizen assembly has a cultural arm that
   sponsors speakers, chamber music recitals and art exhibits
   at the old farmhouse which was left as a centerpiece of
   Kentlands. The voting procedures of the hoa are unusual in
   that non-property owning dwellers, such as renters, are
   allowed a vote.

   These twists might be noteworthy, but the Kentlands hoa is
   still a private body managing a private domain. It manages,
   for example, the pools, tennis courts and clubhouses, which
   are for residents only. Richard Arkin, chairman of the
   association, said that assembly had allowed non-residents
   to play on the basketball courts. But the courts were
   fenced off after kids from other neighborhoods came,
   started fights, and one flashed a gun. You can't blame
   residents for the decision, but it's telling that this
   urban world of kentlands will see no pickup games except by
   those with a membership card. Come to Kentlands and buy
   faux-democracy along with your faux-urbanism.

   Arkin, a former planning commission chairman in the
   neighboring town of Rockville, acknowledges that Kentlands
   represents "New Suburbanism" more than New Urbanism. It's
   still a big improvement, he thinks. "It's a much more
   efficient use of land than traditional development," Arkin
   says. "But Kentlands has two gaps: It's not in the city,
   and it does not have a commercial core at its heart. I
   think the jury is still out. It's a work in progress."

   New Urbanism does have some subtlety and grace, mainly
   because it was conceived and promulgated by architects, not
   bureaucrats or developers lacking aesthetic vision. But
   architects have their own myopia. Their focus on building
   can let them forget, or not realize, the larger forces
   around their designs, such as the region's transit system
   and economy.

   Cities are primarily products of transportation systems,
   not the other way around. The older sections of European
   cities and places like New York and Boston were scaled to
   people getting around on horse and by foot. The classic
   nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century neighborhoods many
   people love were created by the extension of streetcar
   lines. Levittown was a product of cars and highways. And
   the mega-malls and subdivisions that surround Washington
   grew from the highway system that laces the region. New
   Urbanists propose building what are essentially streetcar
   suburbs, without the transportation systems that originally
   supported those kinds of neighborhoods. This is a fruitless
   exercise. The result, at best, is a place that looks like
   Georgetown but functions like any other subdivision built
   off the Beltway.

   SUBURBAN-STYLE DIVERSITY

   It's easy to miss a simple fact about Kentlands: This place
   is very, very exclusive. New single-family homes start at
   $220,000, although most cost at least $100,000 more than
   that, and some run to $1 million. Even in high-cost
   Washington, this is upscale, and Kentlands has attracted
   the white upper-middle-class cream of the Washington metro
   crop. The residents I met were classic Washington
   professionals: lawyers, consultants, lobbyists, and
   government officials. While income diversity is a banner of
   New Urbanism, the reality falls short of the rhetoric.
   Kentlands mixes houses of varied prices in closer proximity
   than conventional subdivisions, but this tends to mean a
   company president living next to a lawyer, not a carpenter
   or teacher.

   Scott and Wanda Elkind, both attorneys, live in a $175,000
   third-floor condominium near some row houses and
   single-family homes. Homes in their half of Kentlands top
   out at $500,000, rather than the $1 million over on
   Stevens' side. Out walking their dogs one afternoon, the
   Elkinds tell me what life is like at the low end of the
   market. "We're on the wrong side of the tracks here, and we
   feel it," Scott says. "There is a little bit of looking
   down the nose from the people in the big houses over
   there." "It was quite a shock at first," Wanda adds.
   "People were cold. I wanted to leave. We're from New York,
   with old neighborhoods where people visit and are nice to
   strangers. People here walk on the other side of the
   street, and when you say hello, they look at you like, 'Why
   are you talking to me?' "

   Still, Kentlands is successful if you use the most concrete
   indicator: people are willing to pay a premium to live
   here. At least for now, Kentlands is selling something
   people want. "I think what's different about this place is
   that we're a bunch of yuppies who were fooled into paying
   top dollar," says Mike Curan, a cardiologist with the Navy.
   "I paid $226,000 for my town house. In other suburbs around
   here, I could have gotten the same home for $175,000." But
   Curan isn't unhappy. "The kind of exclusiveness they have
   set up for the community, whether virtual or real, helps
   keep it desirable," he says. "I know this is a $180,000
   property. But I think it's going to hold its value. This
   place might be the Chevy Chase or Potomac of the future,"
   he says, referring to two ritzy Washington suburbs. What
   higher praise is there?

   URBANISM VERSUS NEW URBANISM

   I live in an urban neighborhood -- at least according to
   how the term is commonly used among architects. Ghent is a
   streetcar suburb of Norfolk, Virginia, laid out and
   developed in the late nineteenth century. Although once
   considered suburban, it is "urban" now because it still has
   street-level retail and is oriented toward people on foot,
   rather than in cars. My home is a three-story town house,
   built at the turn of the century on a 17-foot-wide lot. On
   the same block is a Tara-like mansion with white columns,
   owned by a rich doctor, and a multistory apartment building
   inhabited by a mixture of students and twenty-somethings --
   and a gas station.

   At first glance, a block in Ghent is similar to one in
   Kentlands because of the housing styles and small setbacks.
   But my neighborhood is different. It is not an appendage to
   a major highway. Ghent is part of a larger urban fabric, a
   small section of a larger network of streets and avenues.
   Except where urban renewal projects cleared things away,
   there are no "collector streets" or "major arterials" near
   my home. More important, Ghent has 10,000 homes on 600
   acres, according to the 1990 census, or almost 17 homes to
   an acre. This is roughly four times the ratio at Kentlands.
   (And Ghent is far less dense than New York's Greenwich
   Village or North Boston, which have some 100 homes to an
   acre.) The large number of people who live here makes the
   neighborhood work; without them, Colley Avenue, the
   shopping street a few blocks away, would not have enough
   walk-in traffic. But they also generate the energy that
   makes living in an urban neighborhood both a pleasure and
   a pain. I have neighborhood stores, but I may have to park
   half a block away when I come home late at night. But you
   can't have the benefits of urban living, without the
   drawbacks.

   COMMERCE AND KENTLANDS

   The failure of developments like Kentlands to stimulate
   commerce within their boundaries is where the inherent
   flaws of New Urbanism surface. The Kentlands Shopping
   Center, which is built in one corner of the development, is
   anchored by a Kmart, a supermarket, a discount home and
   hardware store, and a Crown Books superstore. This is a
   typical strip mall; the only difference is that the stores
   have been dressed up with brick facades and white
   Jeffersonian columns.

   This is another example of the deceptive marketing spin
   surrounding New Urbanism. Dressing up a Kmart with white
   columns is on a par with pushing brick suburban houses up
   to the street's edge and pretending it's Georgetown, or
   calling a homeowners' association a Citizens Assembly. It's
   also akin to naming Kentlands' elementary school after
   Rachel Carson (whose 1962 book, Silent Spring, helped
   kindle the American environmental movement): it's part of
   a development that has supplanted farmland, contributing to
   pollution of the rivers and the outward spiral of
   destructive sprawl.

   The shopping center lies just off Great Seneca Highway,
   which funnels customers right into its parking lots. This
   major road, and the interstate highway system it drains,
   created Kentlands' retail hub, just as a streetcar line
   created the shopping street in my nineteenth-century
   neighborhood. And the highway system made possible the
   consolidation of many-layered distribution systems into
   single-point warehouse stores-Circuit City, Kmart, Sam's
   Club. This has made shopping both very impersonal and very
   cheap. If we want a more urban world, then we will have to
   accept more middlemen and paying 20 or 30 percent more for
   a hammer or a pair of shoes.

   Commerce is an integral part of urban neighborhoods; in
   that sense, to be truly urban, Kentlands would have had to
   have been built around Route 28, as my neighborhood was
   around Colley Avenue. Even there, street-level retail is
   just barely hanging on. The trendy restaurants, boutiques,
   and art-house movie theater have survived by carving out
   markets somewhat safe from the tentacles of the larger
   suburban economy. I can eat a meal, see a movie, or buy an
   expensive coffeepot on Colley Avenue. But I can't buy
   underwear or a television set there. To do that, I have to
   drive 10 miles to the mall and the warehouse stores in the
   middle of the metropolitan sprawl.

   "Midtown," the Main Street-like shopping area that
   residents could walk to in Kentlands' original plan, has
   thus far failed to materialize. No developers bought into
   the original plan, and several revised projects have been
   suggested, including a Wal-Mart and a retail-and-movie
   complex. A charrette conducted by DPZ in March yielded a
   new plan for a street filled with low-rise buildings
   featuring ground-floor retail space and housing upstairs.
   Large parking lots would be tucked in back, so that the
   stores would essentially face two directions. In concept,
   it is similar to Mizner Park in Boca Raton, or the Reston
   Town Center near Washington-quasi-downtowns for suburban
   developments built in the last 10 years. If Midtown gets
   off the ground, it may be a good example of how to blend
   commerce into low-density development. The persistent
   dilemma is how to make such a shopping center accessible to
   neighborhood walkers, while also capturing the car traffic
   from surrounding highways that's necessary for the
   businesses to survive.

   NAMING NAMES AND MAKING TOUGH CHOICES

   New Urbanism is diverting society from dealing with
   pressing problems. The issues of whether and how to limit
   new building on farmland, how to expand mass transit to
   significantly cut down on car use, and how to work towards
   cleaner air, purer water, and energy savings in cities and
   the suburbs are concealed by this pretense that American
   society can build its way out of the problems of suburban
   sprawl. This is partly a problem of language (see "What is
   Urban?" above). New Urbanists like to call themselves
   town planners, referring to developments like Kentlands as
   towns or villages. But a subdivision sitting off Route 28
   is neither a town nor a village.

   Truly promoting urbanism would require banning development
   on farmland, halting construction of highways and
   interstates, and creating mass transit lines. Peter
   Calthorpe, the New Urbanist mentioned most frequently after
   Duany and Plater-Zyberk, addresses these tough choices in
   his book The Next American Metropolis (Princeton
   Architectural Press, 1993). Calthorpe calls his strategy
   "transit oriented development," because it stipulates that
   new and infill developments be designed within walking
   distance of public transportation, which would lead to
   compact developments throughout the region, arranged along
   the transit network. If New Urbanist developments were
   really transit oriented, however, places like Kentlands
   would not be built in isolated areas.

   There are signs that the emphasis on transit is growing. In
   Oregon, the state transportation agency recently approved
   a regional mass-transit line, with planned development
   around it, as an alternative to a proposed freeway bypass.
   This took an enormous amount of work by a Portland
   citizens' group, and involved tough political work on
   virtually every level, from federal to local. But it should
   produce real urbanism, not an ersatz alternative. 

   New Urbanism means more than houses. That's what makes the
   subject so beguiling, confusing, and emotional. Whether
   homes have front porches has come to be an argument about
   how best to obtain friendship, love, community, and an end
   to the fragmentation that characterizes so much of American
   life. The decay of our cities and the continuing sprawl
   into the hinterlands has become a metaphor for America's
   general trend toward more and shallower, rather than fewer
   and deeper. In a recent issue of Harper's, Jonathan Franzen
   laments the decline of the novel in relevancy: "The
   institution of writing and reading serious novels is like
   a grand old Middle American city gutted and drained by
   superhighways. Ringing the depressed inner city of serious
   work are prosperous clonal suburbs of mass entertainments:
   techno and legal thrillers, novels of sex and vampires, of
   murder and mysticism." To me, Kentlands is a "clonal
   suburb" of Georgetown.

   Kentlands is an improvement over conventional suburbia. But
   its proponents pretend it is something else altogether. As
   a model of urbanism, it is deceptive. Kentlands is not
   "Bye-Bye, Suburban Dream," as Newsweek hailed New Urbanism;
   it's a culmination of that dream. What's unclear is whether
   New Urbanism is just this decade's fashion in suburban
   design, or a step in the important process of beginning to
   understand how to achieve some sort of real urbanism.

   -----

   ALEX MARSHALL is a regular contributor to Metropolis. He is
   a staff writer on urban affairs for the Norfolk
   Virginian-Pilot.

   [End article]


   Date:    Sun, 7 Jul 1996 22:38:44 -0400
   From:    Alex Marshall <amarsh@INFI.NET>
   Subject: Response to folks on Kentlands

   The gap between hype and reality with New Urbanism,
   including with places like Kentlands, is large and
   destructive. That is the essential point of the July
   Metropolis article. To some extent, I write as someone who
   has been sold a bill of goods and is now angry. As more and
   more magazines print pretty pictures of rows of urban-like
   townhouses built in new urbanist developments, it's
   misleading that the camera never lifts to show the true
   context of Wal-marts, sprawling highways and other stuff
   the subdivision is a part of -- and helping to create.

   But that being the case, let me say: sure, New Urbanism is
   better than old suburbanism. I found out last week that a
   new urbanist development has been proposed in the suburban
   city of Chesapeake outside Norfolk by a guy named Carroll
   Williamson, a native who now lives in Boston. Despite my
   thoughts, I'd like to write an essentially positive article
   about it because, compared to the conventional sprawl
   Cheseapeake is wrestling with, Williamson's subdivision
   offers an improvement. At the place where Chesapeake is at,
   new urbanism is an improvement. But I think the movement
   has really hurt work toward more real urbanism by
   cultivating the idea you can grow your way out of sprawl.
   Truly changing the dynamics of people's lives involves more
   fundamental changes than moving a house up close to the
   street. It involves limiting development of land on a
   regional basis, investing in mass transit, limiting the
   construction of highways, and preparing to pay more for
   most consumer goods. Only then can you talk of moving the
   house up close to the street.

   I'll stand back from my rhetoric for a second to say I
   recognize that the proponents of New Urbanism are good
   honorable people, most of whom are trying to design better
   places for people to live, just as I as a journalist am
   trying to find them. I recognize that half a loaf is better
   than no loaf. And the two cents I contribute is just part
   of a picture built up by many voices, each of which sees
   some parts of the picture more clearly than others (excuse
   the mixed metaphor). For me, coming to grips with New
   Urbanism has been a long process. It's taken me years to
   come to a deeper understanding of the structure of suburban
   sprawl, and why I believe most of what passes as New
   Urbanism does not affect that structure significantly. In
   early versions of the Metropolis article I spoke of this.
   And no doubt my understanding will continue to change with
   time. I think New Urbanists may be going through a similar
   learning curve, which is causing the movement to re-direct
   itself toward the center city, or toward more holistic
   approaches to regional development. If this is the case,
   that's great. And if that's the case, it will take many
   years for this way of thinking to catch up with the
   developers slapping us subdivisions with front-porched
   lined houses.

   John[?], I will not get into a point by point debate with you
   about who I did or didn't interview for the article.

   Alex Marshall
   Staff Writer,
   The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Va.
   Contributor, Metropolis Magazine in New York
   718 Westover Ave.
   Norfolk, Va. 23507
   tel: w.804-547-1626; h 625-6928; fax: 625-4070
   amarsh@infi.net

   ----------

   Thanks to MK for forwarding this from list CNU. Thanks to
   Alex Marshall for permission to provide for discussion.

----------

   For Alex Marshall's September 1, 1996, article in The 
   Washington Post on New Urbanism see:

      http://jya.com/amarsh2.txt






