New Urbanism Development - Essay Example

HOW NEW URBANISM BEGINS: This dated back to the 1980s, because “a growing number of architects and planners became unhappy with the way urban centers were decaying and the simultaneous increase of communities that were fragmented, car-oriented, and spread out”. (History of New Urbanism). Thus in the 1980s, and early 1990s, new urbanism took up.

However, “New Urbanism gained national recognition with the development of communities like the resort village of Seaside, Florida in 1981. Seaside received national media coverage with a feature article in Atlantic Monthly in 1988, and when it was featured in the 1998 blockbuster, "The Truman Show" (History of New Urbanism).

The New Urbanism is a t motivation of architects, planners, and developers “the New Urbanism is based on principles of planning and architecture that work together to create human-scale, walkable communities” (The New Urbanism).

New Urbanism Application: It can be applied “in any setting or community, large or small. In deciding how it might be applied, a distinction between New Urbanism and Smart Growth may be useful. Smart Growth may be understood as the regional policies of local governments and institutions which are intended to promote New Urbanist development. In turn, New Urbanism is a set of design, building, and development principles, which are market-driven and site-specific” (Where can it happen?)

CONCLUSION: In conclusion, an attempt is made to formally “analyze the virtues of new urbanism, a move hailed as the most significant movement in urban planning and architecture in this century. We proceed using the tools of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to develop quantitative measures of urban form. We then incorporate those measures into hedonic price analysis. We find that our measures of urban form capture meaningful differences in the characters of urban neighborhoods that could well have direct impacts on the utility of urban residents. Further, we find that such differences are capitalized into residential property values. The results imply that some but not all of the design features of new urbanism provide benefits for which urban residents are willing to pay” (Abstract).