Perhaps, but I think not. This version of the American Dream is what Benjamin called a “phantasmagoria.” The phantasmagoria is a deceptive image intended to dazzle and amaze; a thing which appears as itself while simultaneously hiding itself. (Benjamin, 1999) We have tract mansions and suburban subdivisions as key to making a home and a place that is so like others as to be placeless and is often only inhabited for a few years. We purchase individual vehicles as the key to mobility in order to sit in traffic on the freeway. We build gated communities as the key to security, and we fear the remainder of the city and leave it to fulfill our fears. All of these offer and undermine what they promise. And, these commodities remain, as they were for Benjamin, phantasmagorias - the “century’s magic images” (Benjamin, 1996). Just as for Benjamin’s Paris the 19th century was a nightmare from which the city needed to awaken, so now we live within the dream of both 19th, i.e., early suburbs, rapid westward expansion of the country, and 20th centuries, i.e., the American century, with booming economic and military might.
These phantasmagorias are also fantasy versions of citizenship. They are perhaps consistent with a highly formal account of citizenship realized primarily through voting activity and consumption in pursuit of a narrow notion of self-interest. Narrow because a fuller sense of self and hence of self-interest would recognize the poverty of this model of citizenship and human living in which there is little connection to people or to place. But, the perpetuation of this very model as dream and ideal cuts against this recognition of a larger self-interest and citizenship.
Further, we have some evidence that the trajectory of sprawl is neither sustainable nor desired. 1998 and 2000 state-wide polls in Colorado found that 45% of citizens thought that addressing growth and transportation problems are the most pressing issues facing the state (Ciruli Associates, 2000). A 2001 poll by the U.S. Federal Highway Administration found that over 60% favor sidewalks, mass transit and bikeways, and fewer than 40% favored building more roads (Federal Highway Administration, 2001). Numerous national publications have examined the growth of suburban “mega-churches” as responses to the isolation and lack of community found in most U.S. suburbs.
The New Urbanism movement is a response to the out-of-control development of the American suburban landscape. Its founding figures, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberg, have embraced commercial residential development opportunities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, with a moral fervor. Hoping to use market forces to their advantage, Duany has said, we must “attack [the] enemy on [its] terms” and, as Plater-Zyberg has said, “improve the world with design, plain good old design” (The Congress for New Urbanism, 2005; NewUrbanism. org, 2005; Duany, 2000; Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, 1997).
New Urbanism encourages the construction and renovation of diverse, walka-ble, compact, vibrant, mixed-use communities using the same components as conventional development. But rather than creating more sprawl, New Urbanism proposes to combine these elements in a more integrated fashion, bringing forth complete communities. These New Urbanist communities contain housing, work places, shops, entertainment, schools, parks, and other public facilities essential to everyday life. Further, all of these elements are within easy walking distance of each other. Rather than highways and roads, New Urbanism promotes the increased use of trains and light rail. In the last 20 years, urban living has again become desirable to a growing segment of the U.S. populace, in part because core urban areas are more dense, and have many of the characteristics New Urbanism hopes to foster. As of 2005, there are over 500 New Urbanist projects planned or under construction in the United States alone, half of which are in historic urban centers.
The principles of New Urbanism (NewUrbanism.org, 2005) are:
1. Walkability
2. Connectivity
3. Mixed-Use & Diversity
4. Mixed Housing
5. Quality Architecture & Urban Design
6. Traditional Neighborhood Structure
7. Increased Density
8. Smart Transportation
9. Sustainability
An important assumption of the New Urbanist movement is the tenet that architecture and the organization of space strongly influence social behavior. That is, New Urbanism, in spite of a certain postmodern cuteness in design elements, rests on the decidedly modern notion that the “built environment” can create democratic utopias. It is also a movement built upon a certain amount of nostalgia. For the New Urbanist architect and town planner the ideal form of human community is found in the ambience of the New England colonial village, town centers, green space, interconnected walkways, where people shared space intimately and nurtured social relations conducive to the free exchange of ideas perhaps best exemplified by town hall meetings. The goal of New Urbanist developments is to recapture, or even to recreate, these sorts of communities. New Urbanist developments attempt to create a space with an identifiable center and edge, in short, to create community through the manipulation of space.
Influential in the New Urbanist search for urban spaces with definable centers has been architect Charles Moore’s (1965) article in the influential architectural journal Perspecta, “You Have to Pay for the Public Life”. In this essay Moore addresses the lack of public pace and public sphere on the West Coast of the United States with particular focus on the city of Los Angeles. Moore argues that Los Angeles lacks an urban focus or center, and that “the houses are not tied down to any place much more than the trailer homes are, or the automobiles. [The houses] are adrift in the suburban sea, not so mobile as the cars, but just as unattached. . This is . a floating world in which a floating population can island-hop with impunity . ” Los Angeles is characterized by a lack of place (Davis, 1992; Jameson, 1992). Moore argues that a central characteristic of cities that are i dentifiable places is that there is a marked and celebrated center. Identifying a place and marking its center is a self-consciously public act where people come together to celebrate a place for particular reasons, and the marker then becomes the symbol of their shared values. In his article Moore claims that Disneyland is one of the few real public spaces in Los Angeles. Disney’s new town of Celebration has its roots in the work of Charles Moore because he was the first to point out that Disneyland was a self-conscious attempt to create an interactive public space amid the disconnected suburban sprawl of Los Angeles. In Disneyland, we agree to pay for the public life we are missing out on elsewhere, just as in Celebration.
Unlike New Urbanism, Civic Environmentalism arose not in response to failures of planning, or lack of community in cities, but in response to three failures of the environmental movement: top-down organization, over-emphasis on abstract theoretical issues, i.e., does non-human nature have intrinsic value), and the deep anti-urban bias that means the movement does not address the places where most people live.
Civic Environmentalism is the idea that members of particular communities are the ones who should plan and organize to “ensure a future that is environmentally healthy and economically and socially vibrant” (Shutkin, 2000, 14). A central insight of this movement is that in order to have viable cities we need to (i) bring the broad interest in and support for protecting remote wilderness areas to bear on our immediate quotidian environment, and (ii) reinvigorate, or create networks of community and build social capital (New Ecology Inc., 2005; Sirianni and Friedland, 1999; Landy et al., 1999; John, 1994). The guiding principles (Shutkin, 2000) are: