New Urbanism lecture on YouTube

I stumbled onto a great lecture on New Urbanism on YouTube today, given by Andres Duany, author of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. In this 9 part lecture, he addresses many of the facets of New Urbanism from retail, to housing, to social housing, to social mixity, to public spaces, etc. He compares the “New Urbanism” techniques to those of traditional suburban planning by using two side-by-side projectors and using very clear and straight forward examples of what each of these entail. Although I agree with most things he said, and learned a few things from these videos, I question his motivations in giving this seminar. Although his techniques seem to be well intended, they are very often hard to put into place in existing communities. After checking out his website, I found out that he is co-president of DPZ, a community planning company. So while his assumptions make perfect sense when applied to the plans of a new community, they are ill adapted for use in existing suburbs. Nevertheless, I’ll probably pick up “”Suburban Nation” down the road to see what else he has to say.