| Welcome to Garrison Woods, where urban convenience meets old-fashioned community charm in the heart of the city. From tree-lined boulevards to front porch streetscapes, Garrison Woods harkens (sic) to a simpler, friendlier era when neighbours congregated on front porches, morning coffee was savoured at home and a family’s safety and security extended beyond their front doorstep.
At Garrison Woods, "home" means an escape to yesteryear in the most modern of urban settings.
Picture an old-style neighbourhood with bustling High Street shops and classic homes featuring welcoming front porches.
–McKenzie Towne website (www.mckenzietowne.com/frame_main.html)
Ya gotta love those front porches, don’t ya? Andy Hardy and Polly Benedict on the front porch swing, sipping lemonade and saying, "Gee, that’s swell," as the aproned Mrs. Hardy brings out some fresh apple pie and Judge Hardy peers over the top of his newspaper, pipe in hand, and smiles benevolently at one and all.
Garrison Woods and McKenzie Towne, with their utopian evocations of idyllic small towns of yesteryear, represent the (somewhat belated) coming of New Urbanism to Calgary. New though it may be to these parts, New Urbanism seems to have become at least semi-official city policy. It was the subject of the front-page article in the Fall 2004 issue of City Talk Quarterly, published by the city’s Customer Services and Communications unit and readily available on the official city website.
The article says city planners are using "the principles of new urbanism and sustainability as a guide" to create areas with "a strong sense of community and a distinctly European feel." Both Garrison Woods and McKenzie Towne (with the deliberate superfluous "e," so Ye Newwe Urbanistes can feel even more like Old Towne Folke, I guess) do strive for a particular "feel" – specifically, British. Terms like "Manor," "High Street" and "Village Green" and place names like "Prestwick," "Elgin" (as in Lord, thief of Greek antiquities, I presume) and "Staywell" abound in the nomenclature. Architectural styles include Victorian, Queen Anne (a subset of Victorian), Georgian, Tudor, Colonial, "English Cottage" and "English Arts & Crafts." Of course, these imported forms are in direct violation of the Charter of the New Urbanism principle that architecture should grow from local history and building practice, but we wouldn’t want to pick nits, would we?
The link between New Urbanism and sustainability in the City Talk article is also rather disturbing. In the same vein, the U.S. Green Building Council is now working with the Congress for New Urbanism to develop LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for neighbourhood developments standards. As someone with LEED accreditation, I am tremendously dismayed by this development. Despite the fine rhetoric from New Urbanism and its adherents (who have an almost cult-like zeal), there is little or no evidence that New Urbanism does anything to advance sustainability. Let’s look at automobile use/dependency as just one example.
One of the most common and demonstrable criticisms of New Urbanism is that it is simply sprawl in disguise. Many New Urbanist developments are built on greenfield sites, and while they adhere to their lofty principles within their boundaries, they are frequently home to affluent, upper-middle-class, white professionals who commute long distances to work. An article specifically about Mckenzie Towne (www.landcentre.ca/lcframedoc.cfm?ID=3472) is titled "Calgary’s McKenzie Towne: Suburb with a Neo-Traditional Façade," and it makes several good points: the development took place on previously undeveloped land at the periphery of the city; while the development conforms internally to the standards of "transit-oriented development," there is in fact limited transit connection; a lower percentage of residents in McKenzie Towne use transit to get to work than the citywide average; and there are 1.9 vehicles per household, well above the provincial average of 1.5. The article concludes, "Beneath its retro design beats the heart of suburbia."
McKenzie Towne and many other "New Urbanist" projects like it throughout North America do nothing to reduce automobile dependency. They just try to hide it by putting garages on lanes at the backs of building lots so the front streetscapes can display those precious gingerbreaded front porches and pretend to be something they’re not. One could also argue that the rigidly gridded street pattern New Urbanism prefers (nay, insists upon) actually increases the amount of vehicular roadway, and therefore impermeable surface, in a neighbourhood. These are not the kinds of things that advance the cause of sustainability. Paul Hawken, the retailer/environmentalist who wrote The Ecology of Commerce, summarizes sustainability as "doing more with less." Dare I say this statement has more in common with modernist (boo, hiss) Mies Van der Rohe’s assertion that "less is more" than it does with the suburbs in disguise that represent much of the output of New Urbanism?
Those front porches and all the other stylistic pretences of New Urbanism and/or Neo-Traditionalism in the service of nostalgia for a past that only ever existed on movie and television screens is mere set dressing. To insist on Victorian, Colonial or Georgian wrappers around houses brimming with stainless steel appliances, plasma screen TVs, iPods, home computing networks, cat-5 wiring and every other expression and "necessity" of modern living inside is nothing more than going up to the attic and playing dress-up with great-grandma’s old clothes. It denies what the house is – a dwelling for 21st century people. It is fundamentally dishonest – a lie told to make people feel comforted and less threatened by whatever it is about the big, bad modern world that terrifies them. It is infinitely more authentic and honest to build houses and neighbourhoods that are real reflections of the time in which they were created and a visual expression of the "character" of their present-day habitation and use. But Leon Krier has said, "even one modernist building is enough to destroy the spirit" of a New Urbanist project, so I guess honesty and authenticity are out of the question and nostalgia wins the day. Gee, that’s swell. |
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