by Robert Steuteville, Public Square

The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities — but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have directed planning and development in recent decades.

This year the 25th annual Congress for the New Urbanism was held in Seattle. The 1,400 attendees, their friends and associates and like-minded people, are like sailors on the sea of ideas that carry this movement forward.

The 25 ideas listed here offer a panoramic view of the New Urbanism, one that reaches to the horizon and beyond. Not all of these ideas were invented by new urbanists, but new urbanists have contributed significantly to them all.

I conducted interviews with new urbanist experts on the 25 ideas, and you can find the interviews here. Now, I offer brief descriptions and thoughts.

The neighborhood and the 5-minute walk are the foundation of the New Urbanism, and are now a foundation of planning in general.

The neighborhood and the 5-minute walk are the foundation of the New Urbanism, and are now a foundation of planning in general. The concept of the walkable neighborhood seems so obvious today, it’s easy to forget that 20 or 30 years ago this idea was radical. In the last half of the 20th Century, everything was built in isolated pods. I don’t know how we forgot the idea of building in connected, compact, complete neighborhoods. Actually, we did not exactly forget. This concept had to be systematically unlearned through the professions, the zoning, the finance rules, and the academic institutions. Then, after 50 years, the only models we had for new development were pods and everybody who ever built a human-scale neighborhood was long gone. New Urbanists pulled the walkable neighborhood from the dustbin of history and showed that it still worked. This may be the greatest achievement of the New Urbanism. The neighborhood and the five-minute walk have become accepted and understood in planning, but they have yet to become the norm because of traffic engineering.