page_title: History of urban planning
section_title: New Urbanism
hierarchical_section_title: History of urban planning / Contemporary / New Urbanism
context_page_description: The history of urban planning runs parallel to the history of the city, as planning is in evidence at some of the earliest known urban sites.
context_section_description: Various current movements in urban design seek to create sustainable urban environments with long-lasting structures, buildings and a great liveability for its inhabitants. The most clearly defined form of walkable urbanism is known as the Charter of New Urbanism. It is an approach for successfully reducing environmental impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve smart cities that support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighbourhoods drive fewer miles and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures compared with those living in sprawling suburbs. The concept of Circular flow land use management has also been introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use patterns that strive for compact cities and a reduction of greenfield land taken by urban sprawl.
  In sustainable construction, the recent movement of New Classical Architecture promotes a sustainable approach towards urban construction that appreciates and develops smart growth, walkability, architectural tradition, and classical design. This is in contrast to modernist and short-lived globally uniform architecture, as well as opposing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl. Both trends started in the 1980s.
  Critics of New Urbanism have argued that its environmental aspect is too focused on transport and excessive individual mobility. The real problem with the unsustainable nature of modern cities is not just about cars and too much driving - it is about the entire urban metabolism of the city (of which auto-mobility is less than half of the overall ecological footprint and accounts for about half of the GHG emissions/carbon footprint). They have also argued that land-use planning can do little to achieve sustainability without regulating the design and associated technology of the actual development within a zoned area. Distances and density are relatively unimportant; it is the total metabolism of the development that determines the environmental impact. Also, the emphasis needs to shift from sustainability to resilience, and the spatial scope from the city to the whole urban region. A further criticism is that the New Urbanist project of compacting urban form is a difficult and slow process. In the new global situation, with the horizontal, low-density growth irreversibly dominant, and climate change already happening, it would be wiser to focus efforts on the resilience of whole city-regions, retrofitting the existing sprawl for sustainability and self-sufficiency, and investing heavily in 'green infrastructure'.
caption: Jakriborg in Sweden, started in the late 1990s as a new urbanist eco-friendly new town near Malmö
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