Artificial Neighborhoods Are No Substitute For Community

"One of New Urbanism’s leading thinkers, Leon Krier, was in Calgary last month to speak to the annual conference of the Canadian Institute of Planners. Krier is New Urbanism's attack dog -- its most vitriolic critic of, well, everything except his own ideas. Here are just a few of his choice phrases: "modernism is a form of radical brainwashing," "modernism is a totalitarian ideology..."

...The solutions the two groups arrived at could not be more different. For CIAM, it was the tower in the park with broad "efficient" streets between them. For the CNU, it’s narrow gridded streets lined with trees, front porches and picket fences. But both attempts are flawed in precisely the same way -- a bedrock belief that built form can heal wounded psyches and magically create that oh-so-elusive thing called "community" (in itself a highly problematic term)."