Oldfangled New Towns

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Duany and Plater-Zyberk have devised a practical way to wield influence beyond the projects they can plan and design each year. They have drafted a Traditional Neighborhood Development ordinance that can plug right into the existing system -- and subvert it. The T.N.D. is a boilerplate document that codifies the nuts-and-bolts wisdom Duany and Plater-Zyberk have acquired, which cities, towns and counties can enact. "The T.N.D. thinks of things like corner stores the way other codes think of sewers," Duany explains. "Everybody simply knows you have to have them." More than 200 local planning departments and officials around the country have ordered copies of the ordinance, and the Florida Governor's Task Force on Urban Growth Patterns has cited it as a model code for the whole state.

It seems incredible that such a simple, even obvious premise -- that America's 18th and 19th century towns remain marvelous models for creating new suburbs -- had been neglected for half a century. Yet until Duany and Plater- Zyberk came along, even envisioning a practical alternative to dreary cookie-cutter suburbs had become almost impossible.

During the 1970s everyone came to agree that preserving historic buildings and districts is a good thing. In the 1980s both architectural postmodernism and the Rouse phenomenon -- the transformation of decrepit white elephants into spiffy inner-city shopping centers -- reminded people that old-fashioned buildings and commercial bustle were great pleasures. Today Duany and Plater- Zyberk, Calthorpe and their allies are proposing to go all the way, to build wholly new towns and cities the way our ancestors did. If the 1990s really lives up to its wishful early line -- a return to hearth and home, a redoubled environmental concern, humbler, simpler -- then the new decade should be ripe for the oldfangled new towns to proliferate, to become the American way of growth. Or so, anyway, it is no longer madness to hope.