New Urbanist Willies

Karrie Jacobs writes in Metropolismag.com about why a New Urbanist retail village in Cape Cod creeps her out:

. . . as I walked out of the theater I was already feeling uneasy--then I noticed that I was not in a normal mall. Rather I was in a fake downtown, an overtly cheerful place with individual brick and clapboard storefronts lined up along something a lot like actual streets. I was in a fabrication--a carefully crafted faux history implanted in the suburban landscape. . . .

Sounds a bit like The Streets at Southpoint in Durham, doesn't it? She goes on . . .

This was yet another episode in my ambivalent relationship with New Urbanism. Honestly the New Urbanists--the Duanys, the Plater-Zyberks, the Calthorpes--make good places. I can't fault their planning skills, but there is something about their need to use the past as a sort of architectural tranquilizer that gives me the willies. I see it as a form of cultural brainwashing, a strategy that doesn't solve the problems we've created so much as teaches us to forget them.

Jacobs goes on to visit Rancho Cucamonga, California, a suburb that just decided to build an urban center, though it had never had one before:

I was impressed by the care that has been taken to craft proper streetscapes. I admired the different architectural styles and materials. I took note of the fountains, street trees, gently modern streetlamps, and occasional grassy squares. I even liked the food hall (designed by Altoon + Porter), a daylight-filled shed that is supposed to resemble a fruit-packing warehouse. Victoria Gardens was not bad--except that there is so much faux memory grafted onto this place that it makes the villains in The Manchurian Candidate seem like lightweights.

Read the whole thing.

She's got a point. Some New Urbanist creations can be creepily Disney-worldish, especially if they're tarted up with lots of faux-historic geegaws. (But millions of people love Disney World, don't they? I just don't get that.)

Of course one obvious way to avoid that effect is to preserve a city's real historic character, and then integrate new development into it, using a little taste and imagination.

You know, we had a chance to do that here on West Friendly Avenue here in Greensboro, but I guess we blew it. I mean, we blew it up.