Urban planners create new communities

It takes Kiki Wallace one minute to get to work. It's not by accident. He built his neighborhood, Prospect New Town, to be walkable, with wide sidewalks, narrow streets and parks scattered throughout. Most notably, its town center is within five walking minutes of every home.

To create Prospect, the Longmont, Colo., developer worked with planners AndrŽs Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Since its construction, the town has attracted a great deal of interest in the planning community.

"We have people from all over the state of Colorado and from other parts of the United States and internationally coming to look at it," Wallace told Smithsonian magazine. "They're all wanting to emulate this type of development."

Post-World War II-style suburban planning assumes that everyone has a car and wants to use it. This model, some urban planners believe, is what accounts for the growing epidemic of obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

Now, a growing number of environmentalists, architects and urban planners, including Duany and Plater-Zyberk, are putting their minds together to create human-scale neighborhoods, where parks, shops and schools are all close enough to walk or bike to. They are part of the New Urbanist movement, the most coordinated effort in this country to create these kinds of neighborhoods.

"New Urbanism is basically a set of principles to get to that holy grail of a mixed-use, mixed-income, fully socially integrated, non-automobile-dependent kind of place," said Emily Talen, a professor of urban planning and author of "New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures."

Planned down to the size of the numbers on the houses, New Urbanist communities have a striking regularity about them. The first town Duany and Plater-Zyberk created served as the picket-fenced, pastel-tinted backdrop of the film "The Truman Show."

If, conversely, New Urbanism isn't edgy enough, head to Arcosanti, architect Paolo Soleri's experimental town rising from the desert north of Phoenix, Ariz.

To capitalize on space, Soleri took advantage of the city's cliff-side location to minimize the use of streets and build in three dimensions. The result is an ultra-compact and contiguous sculptural mŽlange of tilt-up concrete slabs, high-density housing and work space, sidewalks and ... bells. Lots of bells. The manufacture of bronze bells, tourism and workshops support the design interns who are the main workers and occupants of the still-nascent city.

Despite Arcosanti's acclaim as a visionary for creating urban space, it hasn't yet caught on commercially.

New Urbanism emulates many of the qualities of pre-World War II developments, in part by tacking front porches onto its houses, detaching the garages and shrinking the lawns down to the size of postage stamps.