Cyburbia.org is an excellent forum for the urban planning community whether you are an urban planning professional or simply have a heavy interest in urban planning and design, like myself. One of the hottest forum discussions has recently involved the the failure to apply the rules of New Urbanism (dense European-style neighbourhoods) to the suburban sprawl of the vast majority of the United States. According to the forum discussion, the main issue surrounds the fact that these neighbourhoods seem to be created ad-hoc and are islands of new-urbanism within a pool of suburban style neighbourhoods on all sides. It’s encouraging to hear that developers are attempting to create more workable and livable neighbourhoods, but are they going about it the right way? This brings up a really interesting question for me: how and where do you actually begin to apply new-urbanism style developments to suburban cities?
You can find the forum post here: The failure of New Urbanism
