About New Urbanism

The images in the header above are of Habersham, a coastal community in the southern corner of South Carolina, not far from Savannah, Georgia. The community was designed over thirty years ago by DPZ, a company that was founded in 1980 by Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk to replace suburban sprawl with neighborhood-based planning.

Shortly thereafter, Duany and Plater-Zyberk co-founded The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), a non-profit organization established with the goal of transforming the built environment from ad-hoc suburban sprawl towards human-scale neighborhood development. The CNU has been recognized by the New York Times as “the most important collective architectural movement in the United States in the past fifty years”. The term New Urbanism was a conscious invention to bring attention to the crisis of ad hoc suburban development, and to propose a less wasteful alternative to sprawl.

Len Beyea has submitted an essay for our website about New Urbanism. It is here. We invite you to read it.