New Urbanism and Nature: Green Marketing and the Neotraditional Community

Abstract

A central goal of New Urbanism (NU) is to provide alternatives to suburbs through ecologically sound designs and more natural communities. This article situates NU environmental rhetoric culturally and analyzes why this form of nature is being promoted now. I argue that NU anthropocentric understandings of nature reflect and resonate with dominant mainstream environmental ideas in American culture. To understand why NU planners may uncritically adopt these socially and spatially limited understandings of nature, I discuss the institutional contexts of the planning profession. For various reasons, planners historically have understood nature in geographically restricted ways, as Utopian garden, mappable data, and consumer product. More recently, NU ideals of community have been defined by representations of nature that may be construed by consumers as a form of green politics. This article concludes by stressing the need for further research and advocating more inclusive understandings of human-environment relations in the planning process. [Key words: New Urbanism, mainstream, environmentalism, planning profession, green marketing.]My impetus for writing this article stems from a recent personal experience at Seaside, Florida with my graduate seminar in cultural geography.2 As one of the first neotraditional towns built, Seaside has become the symbol for New Urbanism (NU) more generally (Falconer Al-Hindi and Staddon, 1997). As we arrived from the southwest, the pastel-colored town seemed to emerge from a dense, stunted forest of scrub oak. During a tour, we learned that only native plants were allowed to grow in town; ecologically wasteful green lawns were limited to public town greens. Our guide also mentioned that the colors of the homes mimicked the locale's natural setting, moving from the light pastels of the dancing waves (homes located closer to the shoreline) to the darker, earth-toned colors of the dense, scrubby vegetation encircling the town (homes located farther back from the shore). My students had never been to Seaside before and many commented on the town's coastal setting, with breathtaking beaches of fine, white sands and intensely turquoise blue waves. On this trip, I found myself taken with the (private) wispy bridges that framed that coastal beauty. As our guide pointed out, unlike other nearby developments, the bridges at Seaside protected the fragile harmony of the sand dunes, sea grasses and wild rosemary.As I sought out what seemed to be the most "natural" parts of the town, I found myself walking along paths of crushed oyster shells (known as "Krier walks") toward the thickets of scrub oak away from the shore. Hidden from view toward the edges and back of Sea-220

Natural Neighbors: Indigenous Landscapes and Eco-Estates in Durban, South Africa

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Volunteer Meanings in the Making of Place

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