A Critical View on New Urbanism Theory in Urban Planning: from Theory to Practice

In the wake of Jacobs’s criticisms of planning, planners increasingly felt a level of angst over, or even responsibility for, the condition of the city. Schooled in preparing and implementing plans and land use regulations, they appreciated the appeal of a new movement that offered a simple, tangible, and marketable recipe for practice. New Urbanism Theory is one of the contemporary urban theories that developed as a movement within practice as a response to the failure of cities and suburbs in the mid-twentieth century. Now these questions take shape in one’s mind: May New Urbanism lead to planning a good community How is new urbanism developing theory, and how does it contribute to our understanding of theory How is planning theory responding to new urbanism and the insights its practice generates These are questions that the present paper tried to answer them. Using content analysis, various ideas and views about New Urbanism and its formation from theory to practice have been reviewed and criticized. We concluded that although the new urbanists want to turn the situation around and they envision cities without suburbs, in practice, they could not make a good communityaccording to the principles that this normative theory is committed to. In present day, most new urbanist projects have proven relatively homogeneous in composition. Rather than minimizing differences, new urbanist projects have sometimes exacerbated societal differences by creating enclaves of affluence in the urban environment.

کلیدواژه ها:

New Urbanism Theory ، Good community ، Civilization ، Criticism