Headed for the Future? Walk With Me.

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Michael E. Arth claims to be a visionary. His website offers a program of solutions for oft-discussed political controversies, including "overpopulation," "legal injustice," "economic inequality," and "religious intolerance." But when the curious click through to read his plans, they only find so many dead links. And that is how it is with Mr. Arth, judging by what I was able to read about his political theory and his conception of "UNICE." There is nothing visionary there, just so many dead links.

We must expect of our visionaries that they will be self-important in many fields. What distinguishes visionaries from nut-jobs, though, is that in at least one field, their self-importance is justified. Well, Mr. Arth, you have struck gold, predictably in the field where you earn your income: New Pedestrianism is the idea, and it is visionary.

New Pedestrianism can best be described as a subset of New Urbanism. This larger school originated in the ideas of Jane Jacobs and her urban-conservative comrades-in-arms. Jacobs reacted against the modernist tendency of figures like Robert Moses to demolish the traditional city to make way for elevated highways and Garden-City towers. You will recognize what were then called Garden-City towers as today's housing projects, a.k.a. “the projects.” Jacobs famously explicated, in her volume The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that small-scale, mixed-use, diverse inhabitants, and "eyes on the street" made for livable urban spaces. More importantly for our subject, Mrs. Jacobs distinguished between foot-people and car-people. The city is for the former, the suburbs for the latter. Mrs. Jacobs took care to draw the two groups as mutually exclusive, for each represented a significant investment in a particular lifestyle.

Perhaps the greatest failure of American urban design is the attempt to integrate automobile use into the urban core. Over the last century, we have become so enamored with the motorized lifestyle, that there are hardly any places on the continent of North America where daily life can be pursued on foot. Great for the car-people; bad for the foot-people. Mr. Arth has provided a way out. While utilizing the fundamental block design of New Urbanism, Mr. Arth has modified key details that address resounding oversights in New Urban design. Instead of creating two-story houses on a grid of low-traffic streets, as a New Urbanist might, he has moved the garage and motorway to the back of the homes and fronted the houses onto pedestrian lanes. These modifications may seem minor, but have revolutionary implications for the lifestyle of the neighborhood's inhabitants. Instead of a motorway-centric district, where kids play roller-hockey until someone yells "car," the front face of houses now spill onto a plaza-like central walkway where humans come first. Cars are thus incorporated, necessary due to their ubiquity in American life, but relegated to their proper purpose – long-distance travel. With a pedestrian walkway and a few nearby businesses, suddenly it becomes more appealing to ditch the car for daily activities and save it for a trip to Aunt May's. New Pedestrianism is, in a word, sanity. It is sanity re-introduced to the cityscape and the countryside that for too long have been built not for people but for their cars, not for living but for driving.

Okay, you may say, this all sounds great, but like New Urbanism it is overly-planned, utopian, and the market won't support it. Here is where Mr. Arth's brilliance becomes truly apparent: He has implemented his vision. Besides drawing up the plans for all to see, he has actually risked capital on rehabilitating the town of DeLand, Florida according to New Pedestrian principles. And it was a success! What was once known as "Cracktown" has become a gentrified living and working town in the middle of sprawling suburbia. What was once a trailer park has become Phoenix Court, a group of brightly-colored homes around a central plaza with fountain. The market not only supports this activity, it is increasingly demanding it. But are developers too slow to adapt?

While Mr. Arth talks dismissively about libertarians, it is actually socialist zoning policies that are the biggest obstacle to urban renewal á la New Pedestrianism. Much of Mr. Arth's vision is transplanted from an earlier era, pre-Modern, before the advent of comprehensive zoning. Having worked with developers myself, I can attest that zoning often turns idealistic urban designers into lowest-common-denominator subdivision builders. It introduces extra costs into the development process, eating into the wiggle-room used for experimentation. It mandates wide roads, allotted parking-per-unit, low densities, and single uses. Often, developers are stripped of discretion over how their communities will be designed by mandatory urban plans with particular street layouts and landscaping requirements. If it weren't hard enough to convince stubborn developers that they can still make a buck on more friendly designs, they are almost universally prohibited from doing so legally.

Michael E. Arth's New Pedestrianism is the post-modern solution for urban decay. We will return to a lifestyle that de-emphasizes the automobile and supports human-scale interaction. The Europeans are way ahead of us on this one, but with a dose of American ingenuity, Mr. Arth has found a way to incorporate our automotive dependence into the context of a true urban space. I have no doubt that ideas such as these, perhaps popularized by Mr. Arth's new feature film on the subject, will enter the mainstream of urban design practice in my generation. Mr. Arth may have a few dead links, but his greatest vision will foster many lives well lived.

September 29, 2008