This liberates an interest in the street and civic architecture as arenas of sociality. There is, furthermore, a strong interest in intimate and integrated forms of development that by-pass the rather stultifying conception of the horizontally zoned and large-platted city. In so doing, the postmodern penchant for fragmentation is overcome, even as Unwin, the New York Regional Plan of 1929, and Mumford are resurrected as better guides to action than the Charter of Athens. There is, first, the willingness to think about the place of particular developments within the region as a whole and to pursue a much more organic, holistic ideal of what cities and regions might be about. There is much in this movement to commend it, beyond the adrenaline surge of doing battle with conventional wisdoms entrenched in a wide range of institutions (developers, bankers, governments, transport interests, etc.). Collective memory of a more civic past can be recaptured by a proper appeal to traditional symbols. Urban living can be radically improved, made more authentic and less placeless, it is argued, by a return to concepts of neighborhood and community that once upon a time gave such vibrancy, coherence, continuity, and stability to urban life. And in what nowadays passes for the New Urbanism (see Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis, 1993, and Peter Katz, The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community, 1994), we witness their deliberate conflation into a programmatic statement. These two themes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. How to recuperate history, tradition, collective memory, and identity then becomes the holy grail. cities, to that process of perpetual redevelopment that obliterates and erases childhood memories of people and places. But Stein’s remark was actually an intensely personal and emotional response to the rapidity of change in U.S.

The task of architecture and urban design is then construed as a heroic battle against such monstrous deformities.

That reading fits into a long line of critical and sometimes outraged commentary on the “placelessness” and lack of “authenticity” that characterizes many American cities, an urbanization process that produces what James Kunstler (in The Geography of Nowhere, 1993, and Home from Nowhere, 1996) dubs “the geography of nowhere” (soulless suburbs, mindless edge cities, collapsing and fragmenting city cores fill in the pieces of this dyspeptic view). On returning to Oakland after many years of absence, Gertrude Stein remarked that “there is no there there.” This is often taken as a simple condemnation of the impoverished qualities of American urban life, a comment that came naturally to someone who viewed America as her home country and Paris as her home town. On Social Problems and the False Hope of Design

New urbanism