The Charter of the New Urbanism, about which I would like to speak this evening, has been an integral part of New Urbanism since the earliest discussions about what this movement would stand for and how it might be organized. The Charter needs little introduction itself, as it includes a preamble that clearly states the intent of all the principles that follow. What I would like to do instead is offer a brief account of the conversations that lead to the drafting of the Charter, and then to articulate a series of values that informs the Charter and, ultimately, sets a course for a new way of thinking about making places.

Discussions about forming the Congress date at least to the late 1980s, when Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides and I were all working on the Playa Vista project in Los Angeles. We met with great frequency and discussed the need to form a group that would explore and advocate alternatives to suburbanization. We wanted to model the organization after The Congress International Architecture Moderne (CIAM)—indeed our group would stand as a counterpoint to CIAM and the architectural and city planning processes it inspired. We wanted to start with a small group of like-minded architects who would meet several times, agree on a methodology for a new kind of Urbanism, and articulate their conclusions in a new manifesto—which we did, and which became the Charter of the New Urbanism.

It took us some time to agree on the size of the group and who the participants should be. We started with about twelve people because we thought the group should consist of people who were already practicing in this vein of remaking center cities and reshaping greenfield development, and because we felt, at the outset at least, the group members should have little disagreement among themselves. These discussions went on for several years.

In the summer of 1991, there was an opportunity to meet another person whom Andrés had met a couple of times that could be a part of the group. Judy Corbett had invited us to Davis to help draft principles for Community Planning in California that could be adopted by the Air Quality Management District. She wanted to present the principles to a group of elected officials called the California Local Government Commission at the Ahwahnee Hotel that fall. It was there that we met Peter Calthorpe for the first time. After a quick tour of Village Homes, where she lives, we sat down together at the dinner table (along with her husband, Michael Corbett) and wrote a first draft of what has become known as the Ahwahnee Principles. While there was some tension about whether there should be greater emphasis on greenfield development or on rebuilding existing places, it was rather miraculous that in such a short period of time we could agree on a direct, concise series of principles.

Later that fall, we all met in New York to work on elaborating those principles and formulating a structure for them. Peter Katz was working on his book, The New Urbanism, Toward an Architecture of Community, which would make all of our work its central focus. We wanted to be certain that we structured the theory ourselves. Within the course of one weekend we arrived at an organizational framework that related design principles to various scales of endeavor: building, block, street, Neighborhood, District, Corridor and region.

This expansive structure grew out of a desire to be inclusive: Calthorpe felt that the new organizing principle of planning was the region; Duany and Plater-Zyberk considered the Neighborhood to be the fundamental unit of Urbanism; and Stefanos and I felt the reality was that cities were made every day by the incremental construction of buildings and other smaller scale elements of landscape or infrastructure. There had been plenty of disagreement among us about which scale was most important to tackle, so we crafted an agreement to take it all on. Likewise, the differences of opinion over whether greenfields or existing places needed our energy were also diffused because this set of principles could be equally applied to both arenas. It is this tension that has made for such a powerful movement.

With this general framework and the Ahwahnee principles in place, we agreed that each party would tackle the portion that was most dear to him or her. So the essays in Peter Katz’s book became the first venue for elucidating of this scalar organization. And it was this structure that was used to organize three larger scale meetings, which we named the Congress for the New Urbanism, held in Alexandria, Los Angeles and San Francisco in 1993, 1994 and 1995.

The first Congress was organized by Plater-Zyberk and Duany on the Neighborhood. It was attended by a small group of practitioners and others most closely tied to the design field. The second Congress was organized by us in Los Angeles, focusing on the building, block and street and on existing places. A larger and more diverse group attended with increasing numbers of elected officials, developers and citizen activists. Finally the third congress was organized by Peter Calthorpe and Dan Solomon, addressing the region. By the third Congress, our movement was gaining considerable steam. We were now reaching out to a very diverse group of allies that was not strictly part of the Architecture and design field. We were forging relationships with all kinds of organizations, from the American Association of Retired Persons to various environmental groups, from government agencies to the real estate and banking fields. We realized we needed to shift from the academic approach that we had been following to one that was more accessible to more people.

By this time, the Congress had some seed money to turn itself into a formal organization. The founders pulled together a larger board of directors and appointed an executive director in charge of everyday activities. It was with this larger board that we set out to make the Charter the central manifesto that would communicate our ideas most broadly. It would be based on the work done to date, but it needed to be simplified into more concise principles and it needed a longer preamble that expressed the interdisciplinary nature of the movement and our concern for interweaving both policy and design. CIAM had had a Charter, the Charter of Athens, and it had been a very effective model for changing the course of Urbanism worldwide earlier in the century. In the formation of the Congress, there was always a drive to learn from the successes of our predecessors.

A small working group of board members and a few other people was formed to pen the actual language of the Charter; drafts were circulated to an even wider group. In that sense it really was a collaborative document with Stefanos, Calthorpe and Dan Solomon at the helm and with Alan Plattus and Doug Kelbaugh and others contributing. In May 1995, the final Charter was presented to the fourth Congress in Charleston, South Carolina, where members of the Congress, one by one, came up on stage in the ornate Dock Street Theatre to sign it. It was an exciting moment, full of pomp, and especially gratifying since we had managed to bring on board Henry Cisneros, then the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who added his signature.

Three Considerations for Remaking Urbanism

I would now like to speak to some of the values that underlie the Charter, and which ought to be a reference point for our discussions about the projects that are going to be presented. Reflecting on it now, I think the Charter rests on are three basic fundamental ideas or principles: slowness, which is related to meticulousness and density, inclusiveness and legibility.

The first value, slowness, embodies the hope that we can learn to make cities that enable contemplation rather than reflecting ever-increasing speeds and efficiency.

More than a century ago, Thoreau suggested in his book Walden the importance of making places for the melancholy among and within us; sadly, little today is built in a way that would engender such reflection. Most people today would probably agree with Thoreau; what they crave is more time, and more “quality” time at that. Yet our society places an intense value on productivity, multi-tasking and traversing great distances ever faster. Those in the business of giving people more time focus on speeding up everything—from the sound a telephone makes to the processing of computers. Little thought is given to conserving time, or not using time for things we don’t have to in the first place; little effort is devoted to the deliberate slowing of time, so that we can savor its passing. Why not walk short distances for daily needs, rather than driving faster and farther to bigger malls?

Modern Architecture and Urbanism have enthusiastically embraced this compulsion for speed, yet throughout history, great Architecture and Urbanism have also been made by contesting or ameliorating debilitating conditions. New Urbanism offers up a system where people are given back their stolen time, making the world see a new possibility for how we all spend our time and energy. Great cities like Rome are efficient because they don’t steal unnecessary time; they have been built up through the accretion of a succession of compact layers, rather than through repeated and haphazard efforts of building, razing and rebuilding, like American cities have been made. In that vein, New Urbanism offers a place-making model that returns to people the time that has been stolen from them, one that redirects energy from constant rebuilding to conservation, modest renewal and contained growth. New Urbanism suggests new possibilities for how we spend our time and energy—on even great economic or intellectual achievement or, better yet, the leisure time we all feel that we have lost. The greatest luxury, perhaps, is the pleasure of deliberately wasting time. The path to finding beauty, as does the pace to observe one’s own life, takes time.

Slowness in the Public Realm. Many of the principles in the Charter, particularly those that operate at the scale of the building, block and street, emphasize the positive shaping of public space and prompt designers to make places interesting to pedestrians. These principles, in fact, are really about slowness and the qualities of space and place that are needed to sustain human relationships of all kinds.

The Architecture and landscape design of places can grow out of the local climate, weather, location and time—if planning for speed is left out of the equation. With this more languid pace can come a greater appreciation of the nuances of places, of the smells, sounds, touch, tastes and sights. In our firm’s work around the Southwest, for example, we have paid a good deal of attention to creating self-shaded streets, arcaded sidewalks and trellised garden-spaces for transitions and reflection. Courtyards are made to frame the view of the sky.

The public realm should be a place for everyone in society, and part of the New Urbanist value system is based on understanding of the role that development has on the lives of the least advantaged in our society: the underprivileged, children, the elderly. For example, if we were to look at the world from a young child’s point of view, we would realize that we need to recalibrate places to reflect their speed of comprehension, which is considerably slower than that of adults. First of all, children walk, they don’t drive, and when they walk, they walk slowly because they are feeling the cool breeze in their face or listening to birds that may be calling to one another from trees. Children are doing what we as adults should be doing more often—enjoying the visceral pleasures of the world around us. The acts of lying down, rolling around, crawling, walking, observing and hanging out with others have to have their place in cities.

Meticulousness. Slowness is closely related to meticulousness. The Charter rests on the understanding that great attention to detail is necessary to sustain people’s interest when they are moving at a more leisurely pace. Thus the Charter challenges all of us to make more compelling Architecture, landscape and urban space. The hope is that the Charter will encourage an increase in the exploration of architectural and urban form, not hinder it. We need to take a new look not only at the detail of buildings and landscapes, but also at everything from retail displays to the timing of pedestrian signals at intersections to the palpable impression of the region.

Contrary to the common criticisms of New Urbanism, there is no formal determinism embedded in the Charter, no underlying stylistic code for Architecture or urban design. The hope is that the Charter will encourage an increase in the exploration of architectural and urban form, not hinder it.

On the other hand, there is no prejudice against traditional architectural form, which so many Modernists feel. And there is no argument that most New Urbanist practitioners have engaged in the reinterpretation of existing settings. That is largely because so many of us have concluded that traditional Architecture has the highest degree of detail, warmth and humanist proportion—attributes that are essential to the pedestrian-friendly environment we envision.

Meticulousness is also at the heart of the organization of the Charter; it carefully considers multiple scales of endeavor, from building, street and block to Neighborhood, District, Corridor and region. The Charter is based on the conviction that design at these scales is interrelated: Every aspect of a building affects the region, and qualities of the region affect the building. Eliel Saarinen’s work at the turn of the century in Finland demonstrates this masterfully. His plan for Greater Helsinki of 1918 assumed Architecture from a regional point of view. Likewise, virtually all of his architectural work, down to its careful details, carries a sense of the region of which it is part.

Density. Another attribute of slowness is density. There have been two strands of architectural design in the last century. One is work that is light and transparent in its objectivity, work that only barely touches the earth, is dematerialized like digitized impulses and is fleeting in the sense that it denotes little and relies instead on connotation. The projects of Richard Neutra, Alvar Aalto, Zaha Hadid and Bernard Tschumii and the writing of Sigfried Gideon are examples of this type of exploration.

The other strand is work that is heavy and earthbound in its corporeality, work that is dense because it is tied to the world through a certain realism. It is dense because it explores interiority. Rudolf Schindler with his cave-like spaces, Le Corbusier in many instances, Henri Berlage and Robert Venturi all practiced within this idiom. Their work describes a public realm that is full of the stuff of daily life and of a whole taxonomy of people and mythical creatures that are expected to live within it.

The work of Lutyens, in New Delhi for instance, plans for vast populations of Indians on foot with walking staffs, on elephants and camels, or in ox-driven carts—a biblical scene that still exists today. The Architecture is elephantine, carved out of stone with deep recesses, shadowy, murky, fortified like riverbanks holding their own against the erosion of constant slow-moving forces. This weightiness gives the New Urbanism some of its slow, plodding characteristics. Lightness is also valued, but more as life itself rather than as its physical presence and framework.

Smallness. Finally, slowness can mean building cities incrementally, in small steps that can be evaluated before the next step is taken and that are more accessible to people, both physically and politically.

The Charter’s principles are based on a skepticism of the longstanding American belief that technology can be the single tool for solving problems. New Urbanism is founded instead on humanist approaches to city-making. In the most literal sense, that means putting people ahead of cars, but there is more to it than that. The Charter suggests smaller infrastructure investments and multiple transportation alternatives. It suggests systems that allow for and promote small increments of building over large ones, perhaps by encouraging smaller developers or by reactivating the community participation process. This is meant to give individual citizens equal footing with larger corporate interests.

Inclusiveness

The second value that underlies the Charter is inclusiveness, which manifests itself in various ways. Simply put, however, urban settlements should bring people together, not drive them apart, and the same is true of the Congress itself.

The act of shaping the public realm that the Charter calls for is about making places that sponsor civilized, democratic discourse and the tolerance of differences. Discussing the Neighborhood, the Charter speaks eloquently of how a “broad range of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races and incomes into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds essential to an authentic community.”

Consider again the dearth of attention paid to children. The phrase “it takes a Village to raise a child” has become very familiar, but oddly its meaning is rarely considered in its most literal sense when it comes to building Neighborhoods. Children need Neighborhoods to be places of education and social learning, they need to be able to depend on a relatively small and identifiable community of people whom they can learn from, lean on and be accountable to in order to develop social skills. We should be shaping places that engage children and make feel comfortable and safe enough to be at home.

Understanding the Other in society is critical to our future. The warp and weft of history has been the clashing of difference: life is made from including the Other. In a global culture, we have more in common with the idiosyncratic and intimate details of life in a Guatemalan jungle than we do with the base generalities of an airport in Frankfurt. But within the Modernist doctrine, internationalism threatens to kill the unique aspects of societies and cultures, even though nobody really lives the singular generic life described by globalism.

By being inclusive, the Charter also calls for the simultaneous presence of the past, present and future in cities. From the building scale to the region, conservation of what exists is at the heart of the Charter’s principles. Permanence is an essential environmental value that helps us avoid what Octavio Paz called the “mirages of the past and the illusions of the future.”

The Charter favors multiplicity over individuality. In the seventies, Venturi reinvigorated our architectural vocabulary by introducing the notion of “both/and”. New Urbanism takes this a step further because it is concerned not only with Architecture but also with Urbanism and its programming. Cities should be encyclopedic — finely specked with detail, assembled to sustain the interest of diverse people and groups. “Mixed use” is a poor way to describe the rich repositories that cities must be in order to serve as vessels that carry our accumulated knowledge. Cities need nooks and crannies where stories, hopes and memories can reside.

The difficult issue of style, which divides architectural culture, is also an aspect of inclusiveness. Style is a series of languages that not only represent particular places but also are the currency of communication, both among architects and between architects and the rest of the world. Working within known styles is a rejection of the vainglorious artistic “I” in favor of the collective “we”. Yet even such individualistic acts affirm the legitimacy of the rules by breaking them.

Until recently, style has been a too superficial a way of thinking about Architecture. That is because in the Postmodern era, the image of a building was considered to have only symbolic content, so clever buildings had to make ironic use of their image as a commentary on their diminished status. New Urbanism sees style as a language in the service of character. Character is intrinsic to whole form of a building, which is shaped as much by the forces of urban design and policy issues as by any aesthetic starting point.

Legibility

The value that balances inclusiveness is legibility. Much of the Charter is dedicated to making a more evident city form and a more transparent process for shaping the discussions and decisions about the structure of Neighborhoods, cities and regions.

At the regional scale, the Charter conveys an inherent bias towards limiting new growth through finite boundaries and edges, which make the shape and extent of the region understandable. Both within and outside a growth boundary, plans that follow the natural lay of the land and course of waterways, rather than remaking the terrain, enhance the existing qualities of a place and contribute to legibility. By distilling and concentrating the qualities of the landscape (which are the basis for how people know a place before any intervention is made), we can make a place all the more understandable to its users.

Within the Neighborhood, District or Corridor, the Charter suggests that a definite urban structure should emerge. All of those elements could be considered “identifiable areas that encourage citizens to take responsibility for their evolution and maintenance.” After all, it is difficult to ask citizens to take charge of their communities when their communities don’t have clearly perceived boundaries.

Similarly, the Charter calls for more clarity on the subject of private and public space, arguing for a stronger distinction between the two in order to preserve the integrity of both. Public space, after all, creates an appropriate boundary for private space, without which it could not exist.

This is a response to the increasing tendency to make private space seem like public space and vice versa. Universal Citywalk in Los Angeles is one of the most perverse examples of the problem. It mimics the City of Los Angeles with miniatures of various landmarks that are only a few miles away, arraying them along a street-like space and filling them with shops and restaurants. Citywalk may feel like a city of public streets, but it is nothing more than a shopping mall on private property, disconnected from the rest of the city and controlled by a behavior code that is suitable only for private property.

Legibility also relates to the creation of imageable civic buildings, which reinforce community identity. Civic buildings should have a form that makes them distinct within the general character of the city fabric, the better to announce their importance in our society. Likewise, the preservation of historic buildings and areas creates greater legibility by conserving places of unique character.

The New Urbanist use of known building types, architectural styles and urban patterns for new development also reinforces legibility, because known styles and forms can speak in a common language that is understandable to the public. The use of traditional styles is not only an acknowledgment of popular taste, but also a means of communication within a diverse population, for whom any common thread can act as a social bond. One might be able to create new architectural and urbanistic languages, but one must transmit them widely so that they can gain enough circulation to act as common means of communication.

Communication requires legibility (people must understand what is being expressed) and more than one speaker. The suburbs are deliberately circuitous and nonhierarchical, creating unpleasant redundancies and endless repetition. The current vogue of deconstructivism is really an exercise in ambivalence, the approximate and the random. It has often been said that any use of hierarchy today in architectural form merely reinforces a hegemonic political structure. But New Urbanism views city making as a service to all ordinary citizens who need to understand what is being made so they can not only debate its merits but also fulfill their everyday needs in a reasonably convenient manner.

The very act of writing the Charter was an exercise in legibility. Much of the architectural profession is caught up in a game of over-complexity, using a language of jargon and deliberate obfuscation. The architectural and urbanistic language that follows from this is equally oblique, giving the impression that the designers do not want anyone to find a logic in the forms they create. Perhaps the greatest contribution that the Charter can make, therefore, is to provoke a clear, concise debate about the way we make cities. Sadly, that debate has yet to take root outside the Congress for the New Urbanism.

Published in The Seaside Debates (Rizzoli 2002).