Space and New Urbanism

New Urbanism is a movement guided by a statement of principles about how cities ought to develop. The main tenets are that cities should be walkable, mixed in use, compact, socially diverse, and transit-served. This chapter lays out the explicitly spatial aspects of its ideals. Four examples are discussed: transect planning, neighborhoods and centers, social and land use diversity, and density and proximity. Transect planning is spatial in that it uses a geographical cross-section of a region to reveal a sequence of environments, and attempts to create immersive environments internally. For human environments, this cross-section can be used to identify a set of habitats that vary by their level and intensity of urban character, a continuum that ranges from rural to urban. Neighborhoods are viewed as the basic spatial unit of human settlement, and are spatially constrained because of their pedestrian basis. New Urbanists have translated the spatial constraints of the walkable neighborhood into specific design principles. There is often an idealized spatial pattern to the neighborhood, based on the idea that the pattern of streets, blocks and lots can have a significant effect on neighborhood quality, character and functionality. Social and land use diversity is an inherently spatial concept in New Urbanism because the value of diversity is based on the spatial constraint of the walkable neighborhood. Viewed as a whole, every city is racially, ethnically, and economically diverse - New Urbanism seeks to locate this diversity within the structural limit of the neighborhood - which in turn has a spatial limit imposed by the proximity requirements of pedestrianism. Finally, New Urbanism strives for better proximities between where people live and work and the goods and services they require for a high quality of life - an accessibility objective that requires a certain level of density and compactness.