New Urbanism
What It Is
New Urbanism is a planning and design movement based on how cities and towns were built for centuries before post-WWII suburbanization: walkable blocks, housing and commerce in proximity, accessible public spaces, and human-scaled design. The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) articulates and promotes these principles.
Source: https://www.cnu.org/resources/what-new-urbanism
Core Principles
- Walkability — daily activities accessible on foot; five-minute walk from center to edge of a neighborhood
- Mixed use — housing, shops, and civic institutions within the same neighborhood, not separated into single-use zones
- Human scale — streets designed for people first, not just cars; multimodal transportation including walking, cycling, and transit
- Public space — plazas, squares, sidewalks, porches, and parks as hosts of daily interaction and public life
- Diverse housing — a range of types and price levels bringing people of different ages, incomes, and backgrounds into daily contact
- Defined edges — neighborhoods with identifiable centers and edges, not sprawl that blurs into more sprawl
- Civic institutions embedded — schools, libraries, community buildings within neighborhoods, not in remote single-use complexes
What It Opposes
Post-WWII development patterns: sprawling, single-use, low-density, car-dependent suburbs that have produced negative economic, health, and environmental outcomes. New Urbanists argue these patterns are not neutral — they actively destroy the conditions for community.
Three Scales
The Charter organizes principles across three scales:
- The Region — metropolitan coordination, protecting agricultural land and natural areas, distributing affordable housing across regions
- The Neighborhood, District, and Corridor — the essential elements of urban life; neighborhoods should be compact, walkable, and mixed-use
- The Block, Street, and Building — physical design that defines public space, ensures safety, and connects buildings to surroundings
Mixed Housing Types: Two Arguments
New Urbanism calls for a range of housing types and price levels within a neighborhood. There are two distinct arguments for this, and both matter for Wellspring.
The Anti-Monoculture Argument
A community of only one housing type tends to produce a community of only one life stage, income bracket, or household configuration. Singles-only, elderly-only, or low-income-only communities tend toward social fragility — not because of who the people are, but because of what monocultures lack: the interdependencies and complementarities that make a community resilient over time.
A retired person and a young family need different things from each other and can offer different things to each other. A single person and a household with kids navigate the shared spaces differently and enrich those spaces by doing so. Age mix, life-stage mix, and household-type mix produce the cross-pollination that New Urbanism argues is essential to civic health — and that Community Philosophy argues is essential to the village.
The Continuity of Belonging Argument
This is the more personal, and arguably more important, argument for Wellspring specifically.
A village is built slowly, over years, through accumulated gestures of presence — borrowed tools, shared meals, showing up for each other’s hard days, learning each other’s names. That village is genuinely valuable. It took real work. It is not replaceable on demand.
The market housing system forces people to abandon villages they’ve built. Your household grows — you need a bigger unit, you can’t afford one in the neighborhood, you move. Your kids leave home — you’re now overhoused in a place you love, but downsizing means leaving. You age into needing accessibility features your current unit doesn’t have. In each case, the housing need changes and the community bond is severed — not because you wanted to leave, but because the housing stock gave you no path to stay.
A community with a genuine range of housing types makes a different offer: you can stay as your life changes. The unit you need at 30 is different from the one you need at 55 or 75, and if the community contains all of those, you never have to choose between your housing needs and your roots. The village you built holds you through your life, not just through a single chapter of it.
This is not just good design. It is a form of Place Loyalty made structural — the architecture of commitment.
Relevance to the CLT Project
New Urbanism provides the urban design vocabulary for what the CLT project is trying to build physically. Several principles map directly:
- The five-minute walk radius matches the Nested Amenities Model — everything residents need daily is within walking distance of their cottage
- Mixed use at the edges (community-facing spaces) addresses the compound stigma problem in Mixed-Use vs Cottage Court
- Human-scaled streets, pedestrian-only interiors, and public gathering spaces are the physical infrastructure for Relational Accountability
- The housing type range argument above is why Wellspring should plan for studios, one-bedrooms, two-bedrooms, and accessible units from the outset — not as a bureaucratic diversity requirement, but as the infrastructure for lifelong belonging
Useful Tools from CNU
- Shopfront houses and courtyard units as underutilized building types that contribute to diverse neighborhoods
- Graphic urban design codes as guides for predictable, community-appropriate change
- HOPE VI and Choice Neighborhoods programs as examples of New Urbanism transforming deteriorating public housing into mixed-income neighborhoods