New Urbanism

is the most important planning movement this century, and is about creating a better future for us all. It is an international movement to reform the design of the built environment, and is about raising our Quality Of Life and Standard Of Living by creating better places to live. New Urbanism is the revival of our lost art of place-making, and is essentially a re-ordering of the built environment into the form of complete cities, towns, villages, and neighborhoods - the way communities have been built for centuries around the world. New Urbanism involves fixing and infilling cities, as well as the creation of compact new towns and villages.

http://www.newurbanism.org/

Inspired by Christopher Alexander's work.

http://www.cnu.org/

Associated heavily with Andres Duany and his town of Seaside, Florida.

• and a bit with Celebration Fl, the Disney town
  • see Celebration USA by Douglas Frantz ISBN:0805055614
    • review1 review2 review3
    • Jan'2011: not escaping Mortgage Foreclosure.

Praise/criticism by Christopher Alexander:

• The extraordinary contribution made by Duany was that he took the concept of patterns and Pattern Language-s, and created a simple, and operationally feasible way of introducing this concept into effective town-planning procedure, consistent with United States conditions.
• The greatest weakness, without a doubt, is the failure of Duany, and indeed of other CNU affiliates, to recognize the devastating effect of development, and of the developer, on the American landscape, and on the world landscape.
• In order to achieve this very large, and humane effect, Andres has used what is a partly mechanical method. He has therefore been forced, in this first round of experiments (we take Seaside as an examplar only: the other projects work in roughly similar ways), to make a somewhat mechanical version of the ideal.