Six weeks after Hurricane Katrina struck, the US Gulf coast remained in a state of shock. Bodies were still being pulled from the tangled wreckage of homes flattened by the 30ft storm surge and the smell of rot and mould lingered in the air.
But, while most people were still coming to terms with the scale of destruction, one group was already planning for the future.
About 200 architects and planners from across the US and beyond had gathered in the shell of a battered seafront hotel in Biloxi, Mississippi, to draw up a blueprint for rebuilding. Over several days, the group fanned out along the coastline inspecting devastated communities and consulting with local residents and civic leaders before returning to the ballroom of their semi-functioning hotel to sketch out plans late into the evening.
To those unschooled in the factional world of architecture, the sight of these skilled professionals applying their formidable brain power and creative energy to such a worthy cause was inspiring. But not everybody was enthusiastic. Many architects not in Biloxi were horrified by the identity of those involved and suspicious of their motives.
The chief organiser was Andres Duany, a Cuban-born architect known as the father of New Urbanism, a US design movement that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s as a reaction against urban sprawl and traffic congestion. He and his followers advocate a return to compact, walkable communities, reminiscent of the days when American towns revolved around picturesque Main Streets, squares and parks rather than the suburban strip malls and atomised housing developments of recent decades.
It sounds like an appealing vision, but New Urbanism has become a bitterly divisive concept. Critics, especially modernist architects, deride the movement for pandering to nostalgia with a backward-looking pastiche of 19th-century planning. “It is the most pessimistic and unimaginative form of architecture because it does not allow for the possibility that something new could be better than what went before,” says Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture. “These people do not believe in the natural evolution of cities.”
To Moss and others, the Biloxi workshop looked like an attempt by New Urbanists to hijack the biggest urban planning and regeneration project in America’s recent history – the rebuilding of the Gulf coast. Indeed, they thought there was something almost sinister in the speed with which Duany mobilised his allies and secured the support of Haley Barbour, governor of Mississippi, after Katrina.
According to one commentator, the new urbanists were an “agricultural cult” wooing politicians with a “revivalist fervour”. Another accused Duany and his followers of tapping into an “anachronistic Mississippi that yearns for the good old days of the Old South”.
Duany believes the sneering is driven by “professional jealousy” and accuses critics of deliberately misrepresenting the movement. He says the most important features of New Urbanism are its commitment to cohesive, pedestrian-friendly communities rather than to a particular aesthetic style. But he makes no apologies for the movement’s preference for traditional design, saying that Katrina provides the Gulf coast with an opportunity to correct the planning mistakes of recent decades.
“The architecture of the past 20 years has been idiotic,” Duany says. “They had almost completely lost their traditions.”
Mississippians trying to understand what the architect might envision for their coastline need travel only 200 miles east to find the most famous example of his work. Seaside, a new town set back from an idyllic white beach on Florida’s Gulf coast, was designed by Duany and his wife, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, in 1981, and is widely considered the birthplace of New Urbanism.
Unsurprisingly, it is loved and loathed in almost equal measure. Admirers adore its pastel-coloured wooden homes, brick-paved streets and whitewashed seafront pavilions, all arranged around a grassy town square. Critics mock its prissy, picture-postcard perfection and delight in its role as the setting for The Truman Show, the 1998 Jim Carrey film that parodied life in smalltown America.
Perhaps Seaside’s biggest failure is its evolution into a weekend playground for wealthy second-home owners, rather than the mixed-income, working community that New Urbanism is supposed to champion. It is hard to buy even a small property in the town for less than $1m and there are worries that the same sort of gentrification will spread to Mississippi if New Urbanists are given too much influence over rebuilding.
Duany says his opponents’ obsession with Seaside demonstrates the shallowness of their criticism. “All they want to talk about is Seaside,” he says. “But Seaside is just one of hundreds of New Urbanist communities.”
An example outside the US is Poundbury in rural England, a model town promoted by Prince Charles (a dedicated new urbanist), but which has, like Seaside, been condemned as twee and nostalgic.
A representative of The Prince’s Foundation, an organisation set up by Charles to promote traditional architecture, flew from the UK to take part in the Biloxi workshop, known in architectural circles as a “charrette”. Participants were tasked with making initial plans for 11 communities along the Mississippi coast, ranging from the shipbuilding city of Pascagoula to the beachfront towns of Waveland and Pass Christian.
New Urbanists have made repeated trips back to the region since to help local architects and civic leaders develop the plans. Nearly nine months later, Duany says eight of the communities have embraced the New Urbanist vision, while two are still considering their options. The only community to have chosen a different direction is Biloxi, where New Urbanism lost out to developers who want to line the city’s seafront with casinos and high-rise condominium blocks.
While Mississippi was first to fall under the spell of New Urbanism following Katrina, neighbouring Louisiana is also succumbing to its charm. The state recruited Duany’s Miami-based architecture and planning company, DPZ, to conduct charrettes for three of its worst-hit communities outside New Orleans, including St Bernard Parish.
New Urbanists have found it harder to win acceptance in New Orleans itself, perhaps because the city’s quirky, non-conformist nature makes it ill-suited to any cookie-cutter approach to urban planning. But even in the Big Easy, Duany has established a foothold in the city’s Gentilly district, where DPZ is helping run the neighbourhood planning process on a pro bono basis.
The prospect of New Urbanism taking root in New Orleans alarms Reed Kroloff, dean of the architecture school at Tulane University, who fears the result would be a “Disneyfied, cartoon version” of the city. “New Urbanism’s biggest flaw is its belief that simulation can be as good as the real thing,” he says. “You cannot create authentic neighbourhoods by trying to recreate the past.”
Kroloff acknowledges that Duany and his disciples have many good ideas to offer New Orleans but argues the movement is too rigid to be put in charge of the overall planning process. “They tend to be intolerant of ideas that don’t fit their view of the world,” he says.
Of course, that discipline and single-mindedness that Kroloff identifies as a weakness is also one of New Urbanism’s greatest strengths. While modern architects are renowned for their individualism, New Urbanists form a close-knit network working under the umbrella of the Congress for New Urbanism, a non-profit group co-founded by Duany. No other grouping of architects and planners had the organisation or unity required to leap so quickly to the aid of local communities and state authorities following Katrina.
Arguably their biggest contribution so far has been creating the “Katrina Cottage”, a temporary home designed in a traditional southern style with sloping roof and front porch. The prefabricated structure, designed as part of the New Urbanist planning process, is billed as a more attractive alternative to the standard flat-roofed trailer homes provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema).
“We have learned from previous disasters that temporary housing tends to stay for much longer than initially intended,” Duany says. “So it makes sense to provide something that fits the landscape.”
The US Congress has granted $400m of funding for the cottages, which are cheaper than the Fema trailers and more resilient against stormy weather. New Urbanism’s most intractable critics have grumbled about the cottage’s “kitschy” design but most neutral observers have hailed it for its potential to improve the lives of those left homeless by Katrina while also preventing the Gulf coast from becoming a giant trailer park.
The feuding has given Gulf coast communities a rare insight into philosophical rivalries and ego clashes normally played out within the architectural communities of New York, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago. Pres Kabacoff, a New Orleans developer, thinks the dispute is good because it is stimulating debate about rebuilding and sparking competition among planners. He predicts the outcome will be a healthy compromise between the best of both New Urbanism and modernity.
“It is amusing to watch architects argue but it is just a sideshow,” he says. “This is such a big job that there is plenty of room for all ideas.”
