New Urbanism

New Urbanism is the city-planning movement — formalized as the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1996 — that champions compact, walkable, mixed-use, transit-oriented neighborhoods over postwar auto-oriented sprawl. It recurs across Kyle’s City Building reading as a connective thread. In Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City, Sam Gennawey argues New Urbanism “echoed Walt’s unbuilt 1966 plans almost point-for-point,” quoting Disney historian Karal Ann Marling that the movement is “a prettier, less corporate version of the 1965 and 1966 plans for the unbuilt EPCOT.” The book ties the movement to its intellectual ancestors — Christopher Alexander (a “major influence on The New Urbanism community”), founders like Andres Duany and Peter Katz, and Transit-Oriented Development as one of three growth-management models.

In Shortest Way Home, Pete Buttigieg recounts a “crash course in urban planning” as mayor, learning New Urbanism from his administration and diagnosing South Bend’s downtown as “a tragedy of misguided ‘urban renewal.’” And in Kyle’s Open-Source Knowledge notes, New Urbanism is tied to Jane Jacobs’s argument that the “perfect” city cannot be designed once and for all, because how people use their environment changes over time — making the city, like open-source knowledge, a living thing that resists top-down master planning.

Context: New Urbanism emerged in the 1980s–90s as a reaction against suburban sprawl; its tools include form-based codes, the SmartCode, and traditional neighborhood design emphasizing walkability and human scale.

Where this appears

• Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City — New Urbanism as the movement that echoed Walt’s unbuilt EPCOT plans; traces its lineage through Christopher Alexander, Duany, and Katz.
• Shortest Way Home — Buttigieg’s crash course in urban planning and his “misguided urban renewal” diagnosis of downtown South Bend.
• Open-Source Knowledge - Research — Jane Jacobs on the un-designable city, linking New Urbanism to the living, evolving nature of cities.