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Yesterday, Nick and I went to a lecture by Philip Bess, a professor at Notre Dame’s Architcture School. The title was “After Urbanism: The Strange Bedfellows of Neo-Traditional Architecture and Town Planning,” which translates to: “how to build cities you’d actually want to live in.” Bess is a member of the architectural/city-planning movement called New Urbanism. The new urbanists, in response to the problems of suburban sprawl, advocate a return to more traditional principles of urban design. In a nutshell, they emphasize walkable streets, high density neighborhoods, beautiful public spaces, and mixed use zoning, i.e. areas where houses, businesses, and public buildings are all located together. They draw a lot of their inspiration from European and early American cities–think Rome, Venice, Paris, Boston, New York, San Francisco, etc.

As an explanation of New Urbanism, Bess’s lecture was reasonably good, and as with all new urbanist presentations, there were a lot of pretty pictures. The most interesting moment during the lecture was when Bess admitted that the architectural and planning problems of suburban sprawl were actually the symptoms of much larger problems in the society. For that reason, he said, he and his colleagues could only offer solutions to the symptoms of sprawl, and not to the fundamental problems facing society. In effect, the new urbanists are offering a “rollback” to the design of an earlier era, in order to fix all the problems of the current. With all due respect to the new urbanists, who are generally right on in their analysis of what makes cities work and not work and who have accomplished a lot more than we have so far, I think there are some inherent limitations in what they can accomplish, because they lack answers to two big questions.

The first big question is: how do we build real community, a place where the underlying human interactions complement the architectural principles identified by the new urbanists? That question isn’t really specific to cities, and it isn’t even really the right question. The question is how should we live together? The answer is that we should live together as God wants us to live, in Christian community. Ultimately, that’s what all of us behind this blog are about: following God and living together as Christians.

The other question facing modern city-planning is this: how can we incorporate the huge developments in science, technology, communication and business over the last century into our city-planning? One of the things that came to mind after Bess’s talk was the massive change exhibit we visited this past weekend. Walmart, which is one of the new urbanists favorite targets (not unjustly so), was featured by the massive change folks, primarily because of the breakthroughs in technology and business that they’ve made. And Walmart is just one example of the huge advances in science, technology and industry we’ve made in the past century. These advances have negative side effects, but they also have huge benefits: in the case of Walmart, more people have access to more goods than they did before, which means an improvement in the quality of life for a lot of people, both poor and rich. The question we have to ask in designing our cities is, how are we going to incorporate the massive changes that have happened in the last century, in order to make life better in our cities? Now that we can do things our ancestors at the turn of the 20 century would never even have dreamed of doing, how will we use the tools and knowledge at our disposal to build even better, more human cities than they could ever have built?

David