I just read a fascinating article about the Katrina rebuilding efforts in the NY Times, “Battle for Biloxi“, by Jim Lewis.
As a subscriber to Dwell mag and former resident of Portland, OR, I’m well aware of the appeal of New Urbanism, but, given the environments where New Urbanism is given room to flourish (e.g., the pages of Dwell and Portland, OR), I’ve also been a little suspicious of its broader appeal and applicability. As the author of the NYTimes article says, “New Urbanism is like Whole Foods: it’s meant to be good for you, but it’s expensive, at least on the front end, and it comes with a set of cultural connotations that generally play best among the prosperous and the self-consciously progressive.”

This certainly seems to be the case in Biloxi, where a gold-medal commission decided 6 weeks after Katrina, by fiat, to pursue New Urbanism as the rebuilding model. This was a little troubling to me. I have absolutely no experience with public policy or urban planning, but I have built websites before, and there are a lot of similarities between web apps and architecture/neighboorhood design (for anecdotal proof, just look at how often the book “How Buildings Learn” is found on a web developer’s bookshelf). The one thing I’ve learned is that the more input you get on the front end (and the more often), the better chance of success you’ll have. (The other thing I’ve learned is that users really have no idea what they want until they see it built… but that fact makes me sigh heavily, so we’ll just skip along). Endless small feedback loops through the entire process, with each and every one of the “use cases”. (basically, imagining typical users and how they would achieve their particular goals in the system being planned). It seems that the commision had a few use cases in mind for Biloxi – rich folks and casino operators being the big two – but not really the proper panoply. For example:

According to Uyen Le, who works for a Vietnamese community organization, many of [Vietnamese] left behind a world where only poor people walk everywhere and a car is a sign of success. “That’s the American dream: you get your own lot, and you get your own little house, and you get your own car,” she explained. “And now you’re talking about these walkable neighborhoods, and some people will say, ‘I came to America so I could drive.’ Some of these New Urbanist ideas don’t really match up for this area.” [and Vietnamese account for almost 20% of the population in Biloxi - not exactly a fringe "use case"!]

and

[The author] asked Andrés Duany [founder of the Congress for New Urbanism and consultant on Biloxi's rebuilding] what he meant by “affordable,” and he said: “$140,000. We can make a really nice three-bedroom house for $140,000, working with mobile-home manufacturers.” When [the author] asked Bill Stallworth, a black councilman whose ward includes about half of East Biloxi, he was just as blunt. “That’s not affordable for this area,” he said. “Affordability is $65,000 to $95,000.”

and, perhaps most damning and angry-making:

At Tyrone’s Barber and Beauty Shop, Bernice Catchings had flipped through the plan, with its spiffy little houses and tasteful storefronts, and said: “A poor lady like me, what the hell am I going to do with that? Walk by it and admire it? We can’t buy it. The white man will always have us pushed to where we have to just . . . go by and admire it and then go home somewhere and eat them old beans and bread and be thankful.”

What’s sad about it is that New Urbanism really sprouted from the work of Jane Jacobs and her seminal work “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, which strenously argued against the prevailing 50’s urban planning mentality. The success of that 50’s planning mindset paved the way for the decimation of inner-urban areas in the 60’s and 70’s as freeways and atomic suburban home development acted as a low-pressure system and sucked money and energy out of the core and huge ridicuously anti-human high-rises like Cabrini Green were constructed to warehouse the poor.

I really like the tenets of New Urbanism – small scale, high-density, pedestrian- and bike-friendly communities with mixed uses all tossed together. (What’s the alternative? Look at the deadening effect of the modern American suburb, with constellations of similar-looking homes offset from each other by screaming-wide ribbons of highway and strip mall/big box turds in between). The appeal of New Urbanism is the recognition of our common humanity and yearning for connection and community… which makes it all the more disheartening when proponents of this philosophy seem to want to be capital-d Designers more than facilitators of community renewal.

But I guess I didn’t need a NYTimes article to tell me that, in the aftermath of Katrina, the poor, old, and non-white were going to be the last people anyone cares to talk to and help rebuild.