Harald Bodenschatz
If one were to come upon the newurbanism.de homepage unprepared, one might be
surprised. It displays a photo of Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl, with a
presentation of their office in English: ”The ROB KRIER • CHRISTOPH KOHL office
[...] can be considered as one of the few European protagonists of NEW URBANISM.”
A German office has joined the ranks of an American urban planning reform
movement! Are there no comparable references, no similar urban planning reform
movements in Europe that can be cited?
Only a few years ago, New Urbanism was a concept known only to a few
specialists. Who had actually leafed all the way through Prince Charles' book A
Vision of Britain (1989) and come across a remarkable new town called Seaside?
Who at that time believed the prince, that of all towns, this is the one that
“is beginning to influence architectural thought everywhere in the United States”?
Who had considered a serious contribution to architecture the American pavilion
at the architecture biennale in Venice in 1996, at which the Disney-town
Celebration was presented? Once again, the American city seemed to have created
a monster, an artificial town, a dangerous brew of yesterday's architecture,
social sterility and isolation. The Truman Show, the film shot in Seaside,
corroborated this image. Since then, in the critics' minds, New Urbanism has
been linked to Disneyland - they have regarded it as backward-looking,
hopelessly nostalgic; indeed, even more - as the delusion of a false past, as a
falsification of history. However, a picture like this is misleading, too
simple, too easy, for New Urbanism is more a criticism of the American city and
urban sprawl than a campaign against modern architecture.
At a first fleeting glance, New Urbanism is primarily a handbook of historical
forms of urban development. It goes beyond this, however, aiming as it does to
achieve a mix of uses, a social mix, greater building density and architectural
variety within the framework of a set of urban planning rules. It is based on
regional architectural traditions. It demands a focus or multiple foci such as
pedestrian-friendliness, the promotion of local public transportation and the
reduction of automobile traffic. It demands an open city. In all these points,
New Urbanism seeks to provide an alternative to the modern suburb. The basic
premise is that urban planning oriented on the principles of the historical city
serves to counteract the disintegration of society, encourages social cohesion,
stimulates neighbourhood life and injects new life into the community, a
universally respected value in the United States.
One characteristic of the New Urbanism projects is the dominance of town
planning over architecture. The basis of a project is the master plan that
determines the layout of the town as well as the distribution of public and
private buildings and plots of land. In addition, there is an urban code that
lays down the rules of architectural design. These planning basics are
established for the most part through the architectural charrette procedure, in
which the planners come together with the property developer and representatives
of public institutions and social groupings, among others. Over the course of
several days, they determine the planning in stages. The master plan, the urban
code and the charrette form the instruments of New Urbanism. This forces urban
development planning, landscape planning and architectural planning to be
brought together from the outset.
Most of the New Urbanism projects are built in the suburbs and criticized -
often rightly - as suburbs in disguise. However, New Urbanism also aims to
refurbish existing suburbs, for example, by implanting small new centres or by
renovating dying shopping malls. New Urbanism also concerns itself with the
revitalisation of inner cities. In this connection, two main fields of activity
can be distinguished: on the one hand, the projects that target the
revitalisation of downtowns, which are for the most part privately financed, and
on the other, the highly-subsidized projects targeting the renewal of inner-city
residential areas inhabited by ethnic minorities, which are considered to be the
products of a failed social housing policy. For the renewal of these areas,
there is a well-financed state programme, the HOPE VI programme created in 1989,
which has espoused the principles of New Urbanism. When all is said and done,
New Urbanism is aimed at regional planning too. The regional plans for Salt Lake
City and Portland are good examples of it. The many initiatives and activities
targeting reform of the regional planning processes and institutions can also be
regarded as attempts to control urban growth.
As yet, however, it is only to a limited extent that the ambitious
programmatic claim of New Urbanism has been substantiated by the projects that
have been completed. Although there is an evident difference in the simple
system of access roads to the suburbs, the layouts of the New Urbanism projects
have until now been a somewhat arbitrary potpourri from the repertoire of urban
planning history, a collection of quotes and a play of forms that does not
always make sense.
Perhaps the most important urban planning principle of New Urbanism is the
rejection of self-imposed ghettoization and the advocacy of a maximum linkage of
housing estates with their environments. Most examples approach this goal. On
the (semi-official) project list, however, are also examples that are more or
less cut off from their surroundings. The least objectionable variant of
self-isolation is the quantitative limiting of access. Many projects are only
accessible via a single street. A harder variant is equipping the single access
with a guard house, while the most extreme variant, gated communities, forbids
access to all but the inhabitants; sometimes, this complete detachment is
temporally limited, for example to the nighttime. Such variants of exclusion are,
however, the exception. Windsor (Vero Beach, Florida), Blount Springs (Alabama),
Riverside (Atlanta, Georgia), Aqua Project (Miami Beach, Florida) and South
Bluffs (Memphis, Tennessee) are examples of New Urbanism's gated communities. In
contrast, the Disney town, Celebration, is not a gated community as is often
asserted in Germany. Nonetheless, hardly any New Urbanism projects are well
connected to a good local public transport system.
An important principle, propounded repeatedly, is the social mix. In practice,
however, for the most part this applies simply to different income brackets
within the white-collar sector - more than is usual in the suburbs, but for
European eyes in particular, not exactly a revolutionary success. The means to
promote social mixing are very limited in the context of urban planning in the
private sphere: a broader typological range of residential buildings or
apartments, different sized plots of land and qualitative hierarchy of sites.
Within New Urbanism too, this problem has become the subject of more and more
intense discussion, and strategies to counteract the social division of the city
are being actively sought.
However, the most ambitious claim of New Urbanism is situated at another spatial
level - at the regional level. According to at least some elements of the New
Urbanism movement, it is only at the regional level that the goals of social and
spatial sustainability can be achieved. The goal is a networked, socially
balanced regional city with flexible limits to growth. One proponent of this
view is Peter Calthorpe, who, together with William Fulton, published a manifest
on this thematic complex in 2001, the book The Regional City. Planning for the
End of Sprawl. New Urbanism has set itself the goal of qualifying the entire
urban region, downtown AND suburbia, not just downtown OR suburbia.
New Urbanism is also an institutionalized movement. In conscious critical
dependence on the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne (CIAM) which
took place between the two World Wars, it is organized in the form of congresses
(Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU)). The first one took place in Alexandria,
Virginia in 1993, and the tenth in Miami Beach in 2002. Over 1,000 people
attended the congresses in recent years, mainly Caucasians between 30 and 40
years of age, but the social and professional spectrum was nonetheless very wide.
People who in Europe would not even speak to each other meet there,
representatives of the faction calling for circumspect urban renewal,
neotraditionalist architects, high-ranking politicians, investors'
representatives, critics of architecture, environmental activists and those
representing social initiatives in urban districts. This encounter between
different protagonists is one of the most fascinating aspects of New Urbanism.
The Congress for the New Urbanism is not a professional association of
architects and planners, but a union of professionals of all kinds, a
programmatic institution. In this regard, it is also more complex than the
historical Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.
New Urbanism is above all a network for the exchange of information and the
propagation of reform in urban planning. As such, it is linked to other networks
that pursue similar goals, for example, Smart Growth, the Sierra Club, the
National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Neighbourhood Coalition
and many more. “Smart Growth America - Better Choices for Our Communities” is an
umbrella organisation - a supra-network, so to say.
The different currents in New Urbanism can be narrowed down to two;
simplistically put: one which is more concerned with urban design, with the
urban form, and the other, with less interest in form than in ecological and
social goals. The interlinking of design goals and socio-ecological goals within
the framework of common areas of discussion - neighbourhood or community,
transport, region - is the movement's strength. The message of the congress in
Milwaukee (CNU VII, 1999) went something like this: it is not a matter of
suburban projects, but primarily of revitalizing inner cities. The message of
the Portland congress (CNU VIII, 2000) was to the effect that it is the social
perspective that is important, the coming to terms with the question of how a
social mix can be attained, how the edging out of socially disadvantaged groups
(gentrification) is to be confronted. The message of the New York congress (CNU
IX, 2001) was that it is the regional perspective that is important, questions
about the regional control of urban growth, about traffic, but also about design.
By contrast, in Miami (CNU X, 2002), the main preoccupation was the question as
to how regions marked by urban sprawl could be urbanised.
From a European viewpoint, the culture of critical self-analysis with respect to
important urban planning projects, such as that of the journal New Urban News,
is really impressive. The principles of New Urbanism are summarized in a charter,
which was passed in review at the IVth Congress for the New Urbanism in
Charleston, South Carolina in 1996. This charter was published in German in the
journal Die alte Stadt (4/1998). A book edited by the Congress for the New
Urbanism and published in 1999 explains the charter in detail.
Like every movement, New Urbanism rewrites the history of urban planning. Its
places of reference are primarily the historical cities of the USA, for example,
New Orleans, Charleston and Savannah, but also the upper-class suburbs built
prior to the First World War, the railroad suburbs like Forest Hills Gardens in
Queens. Frederick Law Olmsted is considered to be a great artist. The garden
cities of the period between the wars have been rediscovered, above all the
great works of John Nolen, which had fallen into oblivion. Among these were, for
example, the paternalistic garden city Mariemont near Cincinatti, which Werner
Hegemann had introduced to a German audience between the wars, but also Venice,
Florida. Historically, Werner Hegemann was an exemplary mediator in matters of
urbanism, and what is more, in both directions - from Europe to the USA and vice
versa.
Do we need an urban development reform in Europe? Aren't our cities in better
condition than American cities? Indeed, in Europe, we should not be speaking yet
again of a crisis in cities, but instead of a radical upheaval - the demise of
the city of the industrial age. Many inhabitants have left the compact,
compressed city, at any rate those who, thanks to elevated income levels, have
the luxury of choice. Suburbanization has long been accepted; the shopping
centres and later the tertiary workplaces and the leisure facilities - all with
neap clean spatial separations - followed the move to living in the areas around
the big cities. This development represents a dual danger: spatially, it
encourages urban sprawl in the landscape, socially, it encourages the isolation
and the drifting apart of different social classes. The concept of “city” itself
has become hollow: it evokes picture-book associations that have little to do
with reality. The city dissolves into islands of functions; urban planning
becomes isolated development. We are no longer dealing with towns, but with big
city regions with which we still don't associate any particular images. In this
situation of upheaval, all elements of the city of industrial society have to be
tested for the capacity to survive. This is true not only for the highly
condensed living quarters for the masses built prior to the First World War, but
also for the centres of the towns, the housing estate landscape of the 1920s to
the 1970s, and in particular for the urban sprawl that has been accelerating
since the 1960s. A debate over the past and the future of the European city is
necessary.
Naturally, in Europe there are also influential urban development institutions,
associations, prophets, concepts, ideas and many projects that grapple with
these fundamental issues. Not only L‚on and Rob Krier, but also Pier Luigi
Cervellati, Thomas Sieverts and Richard Rogers are well-known representatives of
the European urban development debate. All these experts speak out vehemently
against urban sprawl, even though the consequences they foresee are very
different. However, these differences are not discussed in a constructive debate,
unfortunately, but explained or condemned in the context of an inimical struggle
between opposing factions. It is often less a matter of urban planning positions
than it is of architectural approaches - for or against traditionalist
architecture. Behind the dominant fronts in the architecture war unfold other
conflicts, also relating to urban development - in Germany, for example, that
between the representatives of the European city and the “City-in-between”. This
building of fronts is characterized by a unidimensional narrowness; it is a
product of the profession, of the struggle for cultural hegemony in the
architecture debate and, in the end, the competition for orders; it is not the
product of a debate on all levels of society.
The treatment of Rob and Léon Krier is a good example of these inimical
relations - where do we find a relatively unbiased analysis of their written,
drawn and built work and their positions, in particular, of their work in urban
planning? In the treatment of the Krier brothers, the crudity of the cudgel
prevails, not the sharpness of the pen.
In Europe too, the evaluation of key projects in urban development is very
underdeveloped. Where can we find studies that soberly evaluate the
redevelopment of the historical centre of Bologna in the 1970s, the products of
the 1984/87 International Building Exhibition in Berlin or the newly designed
public spaces in Barcelona at the beginning of the 1990s? A short-winded
reception prevails. At the outset of these projects, both expert and lay
audiences are bombarded with euphoric reports, but the nuanced consideration of
their usefulness with the hindsight afforded by time does not take place. The
debates in urban development are more or less isolated, fragmented, caught in
the crossfire between the fronts in historical disputes. Demonization, repulsion,
exclusion and lack of evaluation dominate the European debates; dialogue is
frozen, the platforms available for a dialogue are limited. Comprehensive
programmatic, supra-professional institutions are lacking. To make matters worse,
the traditional instruments of European urban development debates - building
exhibitions and mega-events like the Olympics and World Fairs - no longer have
the momentum they had in the 1980s. The festivalization of urban planning has
lost its originality.
The representatives of neotraditionalist urban development might counter with
the remark that there are networks, like A VISION OF EUROPE and INTBAU. But do
these neotraditional networks have any striking effect? Aren't the organised
European neotraditionalists still more a self-centred crowd of architects who
pat each other on the back? Do they make enough of a distinction between
architecture and urban development? Are they really fighting for the
establishment of a programmatic, supra-professional network that actively seeks
promising dialogue with other groups who also have the improvement of conditions
in European cities at heart?
As long as New Urbanism was only a few pictures and words, it was not taken
really seriously. The first projects by architects of the New Urbanism also
remained largely unacknowledged, for example, the Fundus-Gruppe's project on the
Baltic, Wustrow Garden City in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, planned during the 1990s.
The urban planning design for Wustrow followed the traditional housing estate
models of the first decades of the twentieth century; it structured the public
spaces hierarchically and defined a proper centre as well as a clear border to
the housing estate. The garden city was conceived for pedestrians and offers a
variety of different types of houses. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk,
who planned Seaside in Florida, are in charge of the urban planning design of
Wustrow Garden City. Their contact architect in Germany is Duane Phillips. The
property developer, the Fundus-Gruppe, has become well known in Berlin through
the building of the Hotel Adlon at Pariser Platz, as well as Quartier 206 on
Friedrichstraße.
Another urban development project of the early 1990s was well documented and
widely discussed, but hardly anyone noticed that the architects had New Urbanist
sympathies. It is the new suburb northeast of Berlin, Karow-Nord. After a
four-month competitive workshop in which Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl also took
part, it was decided on 20th October 1992 that the Moore Ruble Yudell office
would design this key project. With some 5,000 apartments, Karow-Nord was
considered to be the largest mainly privately financed building project in the
new federal states. It corresponded to the guidelines for suburban developments
that was formulated in 1993 by the Berlin Senate's Director of urban planning,
Hans Stimmann: Suburbs “are distinguished by a nuanced social mix and a
corresponding mix of uses”. 20% of the floor area was to be reserved for “workplaces”.
The suburb was to “be given its own identity in terms of content, an identity
that would create a link to the history and uses of the respective locations”.
Suburbs “are designed according to a traditional urban development scheme. The
main elements are clearly designed streets and squares as the basic framework
for identity and orientation”. The image of the new suburbs ”should be
characterized by, and marked - in public spaces above all - by intensive tree
plantings, parks, playing areas and sports fields”. The model was therefore “no
longer the (big) housing estate, but instead the suburb, whose size keeps steady
at 5,000 apartment units”. It was not to be a collection of single family houses;
on the contrary: “80% of the apartments are to be in the form of multi-storey
apartment buildings and a maximum of 20% of the apartments are to be in the form
of individual houses, each on its own plot of land.”
If such a relatively condensed suburb was selected as a model, modernist suburbs
- the housing estates of the 1920s, 50s and 60s - were clearly being rejected.
The goal was the return to the principles of bourgeois apartment building during
imperial times in Berlin. The desired social mix was to be achieved by
differentiating the sponsorship output: a third of the apartments was to be
built as classic social housing “for wide sections of society,” one third with
support that meant higher, but still subsidized prices and a third without
support and with the corresponding top prices.
It is Karow-Nord (which was re-baptized as Neu-Karow so as to update its image)
that shows how difficult the urban planning dialogue between Europe and the USA
is. Karow-Nord was presented in a variety of New Urbanism publications as a
showpiece, without the Berlin suburb debate being touched on. In Berlin, on the
other hand, no one breathed a word about New Urbanism. In America, in the same
way and at the same time, another important neotraditionalist project was being
ignored. Kirchsteigfeld was built by Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl south-west of
Berlin, in Potsdam, Brandenburg's capital. In Kirchsteigfeld as in Karow Nord,
the same private investor, Groth & Graalfs, played a key role. Both projects
were developed in a workshop procedure similar to the American charrette. With
regard to the planned mixed use, Kirchsteigfeld continues to suffer from the
economic stagnation affecting Berlin's surroundings. With regard to the
boundaries of the city, the design of public spaces, the formation of centres,
links to the surroundings, access to the public local transport system and the
inclusion of nature, Kirchsteigfeld can be considered an outstanding example of
traditional urban planning composition, even if several compromises had to be
made during the process of realization.
Even less well known in Germany is the intensive exchange between
representatives of New Urbanism and Bauhaus Dessau in the 1990s. Fire and water?
Not at all. First of all, this contact shows that the usual image of the
contemporary Bauhaus, like that of New Urbanism in Germany, does not quite fit
the reality. Under the direction of Harald Kegler (then at Bauhaus Dessau) and
Alan Shulman or Jean-Francois Lejeune (University of Miami), German and American
students were working on proposals for the revitalization of disused industrial
areas in the “Industrial Gardens Realm”, the Bauhaus' experimental district
between Dessau, Bitterfeld and Wittenberg. The charrette procedure had already
been imported in 1992 and successfully tested using the example of the disused
industrial area of Vockerode. Further regular exchanges of students and
faculties followed. In this way, proposals to re-urbanize the suburbs and to
revitalize the inner cities were drafted for the disused industrial areas of
Bitterfeld (1995) as well as for the urban sprawl around the town of Wolfen,
formerly heavily industrialized, and for the periphery of the former mining area
near Bitterfeld (1998). A visiting professorship for Harald Kegler at the School
of Architecture of the University of Miami can be seen as evidence that on the
American side too, the transfer of European experience to the United States was
encouraged. A high point of the exchange process was the participation of
students from the University of Miami at the Bauhaus-Kolleg, called into being
in 1998 by the then Bauhaus director Hardt-Waltherr Hämer. The theme for the
pilot phase of this college was the treatment of the urban sprawl in
post-industrial regions. The results of this joint work were shown in 2002 at
the Art Gallery of South Florida in Miami Beach on the occasion of the Xth
Congress for the New Urbanism. Incidentally, it was also at the Bauhaus-Kolleg
that Rob Krier was able to put forward for discussion his Kirchsteigfeld project
in 1998.
Lastly, entirely unknown even among the experts is the urban planning reform
project in Eggesin, a small former military town in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania
near the Polish border. There, the charrette was used to exemplary effect by
Wolfgang Serbser (Technical University of Cottbus), Harald Kegler, the office of
Duane Phillips (contact architect in Berlin for the office of Andres Duany and
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk) and the author of this essay. By means of a two-stage
charrette procedure and with the strong participation of both local officials in
the housing authority and the inhabitants, a design plan was drawn up for the
dismantling of factory-made housing facilities, the cautious partial re-use of
concrete slabs, the re-urbanization of the disused areas and the re-integration
of this refurbished area into the regional context, even including the
conceptual design for an urban region near Szczecin.
The subject raised in Eggesin, “shrinking cities”, points to a world very
different from the hothouse climate of urban growth in which New Urbanism
thrives in America. For this new urban development task, in 2001, the German
government instituted a nation-wide competition to find innovative solutions for
the East German communities. 270 cities submitted contributions. Among the ten
winners of the first prize was the town of Gräfenhainichen in Sachsen-Anhalt.
The jury awarded this first prize to the former mining town in the brown coal
district of central Germany because of its use of a participation procedure new
to the jury, the charrette, and the innovative solutions arrived at within the
framework of this charrette for the renovation of the town afflicted by social,
ecological and infrastructural problems. At the same time, the charrette
procedure - led by Harald Kegler - enabled the very successful integration of
strategies for supplying the entire town with regenerative energy and for
landscape design of the disused industrial areas, the original areas where the
culture of reform in German planning took root in the 1990s. This can be seen as
a model for transatlantic dialogue, as there was neither imitation nor outright
rejection, but instead, in a critical dialogue, the experience of New Urbanism -
without using this label explicitly - was integrated into the new planning
culture.
The New Urbanism did not become known to a wider audience in Germany until the
Fundus-Gruppe did a project in Berlin too, one that was designed by Andres Duany:
the Johannisviertel project. It is on a very prominent site - the vacant area
around Tacheles, the alternative art and culture centre in the Spandauer
Vorstadt, a tourist magnet at the historical centre of Berlin. The project is
financed by private investment, as is usual in the USA, but it has to deal with
a relatively strong public sector, as is typical for Europe. It is an inner-city,
mixed-use project. It links together two important streets in the historical
centre - Oranienburger Straße and Friedrichstraße. There are only a few places
in the centre of Berlin that are so well connected. The project represents a
variation on the model of the successful Berlin centre renewal, the Hackesche
Höfe. It stands for a type of conversion of big city centres that is all the
rage now. Before the Miami office was brought in, the investor had staged a sort
of private competition in which several international architects took part. Two
German offices got onto the short list: the Libeskind office and the office of
Rob Krier and Christoph Kohl. The awarding of the contract to Andres Duany set
off an urban development controversy: Berlin was on the brink of Disneyfication,
said the opponents of the project, an indication of how miserable the basis for
a transatlantic urban development dialogue was. But not only that, with the
brief being awarded to Andres Duany of Miami, neotraditional urban development
clearly gains a new dimension. It is taken more seriously, although for that
very reason, at the same time, it serves as programmatic legitimation, which
promotes the entire project in the end. For Andres Duany offers more than a
concrete urban development concept; he offers more than a German architect's
office can at the moment: he offers the programmatic background of a broad,
well-organized reform movement with a large public resonance.
This little story about the arrival of New Urbanism in Germany reveals a
fundamental problem: neither side knows very much about the reality and the
conditions of reference of urban development on the other side of the Atlantic.
The German critics of the New Urbanism have seen hardly any realized New
Urbanism projects in the USA for themselves; neither have they taken part in any
sessions of the Congress for the New Urbanism. However, the representatives of
New Urbanism do not have much knowledge of the present situation or of the
tradition of European urban planning either. This became clear at the 2002
Congress in Miami Beach. There, there was an “International Urbanism” section in
which examples from Europe too were presented, among them not merely one example
in Brussels that was presented by the private investor Christian Lasserre (an
important one for the European debate), but also a project in Dublin. This
latter was doubtless interesting, but in principle, normal practice in many
European cities. A systematic view of Europe was missing entirely. The
invitation of Europeans such as the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava (to the
Congress in Milwaukee) or the Berlin Senate's Director of urban planning, Hans
Stimmann, (to the Congress in New York) has not even begun to fill this gap.
Nonetheless, representatives of New Urbanism are beginning to pick up European
briefs as well. And these American architects are not only competing with German
architects, who have Modernist sympathies, but also with neotraditionalist
architects.
New Urbanism is also of interest for Europe, not so much because of its
architecture - America has a different building tradition, a different
residential tradition, differing as much in construction as in production and
design. In contrast, the strategic focus on urban development for the
post-industrial city and the struggle against urban sprawl is extraordinarily
fruitful. The urban planning principles of New Urbanism are not unlike the
principles of the European city, even though putting them into practice produces
a totally different picture and totally different spaces. We Europeans can learn
from American suburbia above all, from the analyses as well as the practical
experiments, while the urban development of suburban lots such as those in
Tübingen and Freiburg ought to be of interest to Americans. In any case,
Europeans have more experience with the regeneration of inner cities, in
particular with urban development in shrinking cities in formerly industrial
regions. In the USA, urban design is mainly a task fulfilled by the private
sector, whereas in Europe, it is mainly fulfilled by the public sector, although
in the last two decades, the importance of this latter has been declining in
favour of big private investors. Another difference shows up in the strategic
orientation. While the qualification of the “semi-city” is often seen as the
counterpart to the qualification of the compact city (and this is not only in
Germany), the New Urbanism avoids a polarizing opposition between inner city and
suburbia. The fight is not against suburbia as such, but against sprawl. The
goal is the qualification of the regional city. According to the message from
the States, in a suburbanized city region, the unique profile of the compact
city has to be redefined and balanced out again and again. In order to do this,
the direct and indirect subsidy mechanisms that encourage suburbia also have to
be dismantled and in suburbia, typologies of a peripheral urbanization have to
be experimented with.
From the European perspective, the most interesting thing is the movement of New
Urbanism itself, its practical orientation, expressed in numerous experiments,
and its discursive orientation, expressed in a wide-ranging, comprehensive
debate that takes in all the professions and lobbying groups concerned. It is
the sort of debate that we are not familiar with in Germany, a debate that
includes not only concrete criticism of details but also criticism on the
fundamental level. We cannot simply imitate this movement. Our culture, our
conditions are different. Architects and planners, environmental and social
activists, politicians and investors - in Europe all these groups have their own
circles, associations and institutions in which they all more or less
successfully go round in circles with each other. This is a great weakness that
we must recognize and work on, picking up the thread from our own experience,
but also analyzing the experience of New Urbanism.
Europe needs its own urban development reform movement. This means first and
foremost widening the debate to the level of the city-region and interconnecting
the design discourse with the political, economic, social and ecological
discourses. Furthermore, it means evaluation of the new key projects in European
urban development. It also means the renewal of the rich historical experiences
of urban planning in Europe that are often handed down to us only in distorted
form by a one-sided history of architecture. And lastly, it means the
establishment of a programmatic, institutionalized platform that will enable and
encourage this exchange of experience. Only then will we be really capable of
dialogue, not just between ourselves, but across the Atlantic as well. It is
beyond all shadow of a doubt that Rob Krier and his work ought to be called upon
in establishing such a process.
For information, suggestions and criticism, I thank Ursula Bodenschatz, Harald
Kegler, Frank Roost and Barbara Schönig.
Published in:
Rob Krier: Town Spaces,
Contemporary Interpretations in Traditional Urbanism; Krier – Kohl – Architects,
Introduction by Michael Graves, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel, 2003, p. 266 - 279