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What’s Wrong with Best Practice? Questioning the Typification of New Urbanism

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  • Susan Moore

Abstract

Best practice is most often perceived as a powerful heuristic tool for the dissemination of innovation and knowledge. Hence, its formation and acceptance are seldom questioned. The unquestioned compliance with practices labelled as ‘best’, however, obscures the processes of typification that enable it—that is to say, the cultural struggles, tensions, conflicts, collaborations, alliances and personal/professional justifications that prefigure it. This paper uses the proliferation of New Urbanism in Toronto to unpack theoretically the typification of best practice in order to demonstrate how the universal abstraction of this principle-based movement is underpinned by deeper, highly situated, constructions of aligned interests and emergent socio-political rationalities.

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  • Susan Moore, 2013. "What’s Wrong with Best Practice? Questioning the Typification of New Urbanism," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 50(11), pages 2371-2387, August.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:urbstu:v:50:y:2013:i:11:p:2371-2387
    DOI: 10.1177/0042098013478231
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    Cited by:

    1. Jie Lan Xu, 2017. "Is New Urbanism changing the suburban development pattern? A case study of the Toronto region," Journal of Urban Design, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 22(6), pages 812-832, November.
    2. Marco Adelfio, 2014. "The future of single-family detached housing," Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 7(3), pages 217-220, September.

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