The movement, broadly known as new urbanism, combines social ideals with specific urban design goals as a means to improve civic life, said Steven Bodzin, communications director of the Congress for the New Urbanism in San Francisco. While Providence isn't a pure new urbanist design, it retains features unique to the growing urban planning phenomenon. We've gone from having maybe two or three projects that were consciously new urbanist in 1992 to about 300 that are under construction or fully built today. It's rising at about 25 percent per year, pretty steadily for the past two years. New urbanism is gaining popularity for two main reasons, Bodzin said.
Suburban traffic continues to increase as subdivisions are built farther away from a city's core.
The suburban housing market also underserves young singles, couples without children, empty nesters and the elderly, who often prefer to live in apartments, condominiums or smaller single-family homes that the market doesn't always provide, he said. The country's first new urbanist development debuted in Florida in the early 1990s. Seaside, a resort town located between Destin and Panama City, has become a model for other Traditional Neighborhood Development-style projects. Celebration, another TND community near Orlando, opened in 1996 and served as inspiration for Ballard's project in Macon. Ballard visited the 10,000-acre development, owned by a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company, while working on initial design concepts for Providence.