Media Mindfulness

Good discussion about the ecology of New Urbanism:

AlterNet: EnviroHealth: Cities of the Future Won’t Look Like Ours:

Yet another vision of the future is supplied by the New Urbanists, who have campaigned for a return to the body of principle and methodology drawn from successful historic practice rather than science fiction, politics, or metaphysics. That is, they rely on urban design that has proven to work well in the past and is worth emulating — by which I mean the relations of buildings to public space and with each other, not the deployment of sewer lines and other infrastructure. The New Urbanists are marginalized because their reliance on tradition is considered sentimental and nostalgic. Their work is viewed by the mandarins of architecture through the lens of Modernist ideology, which, going back a hundred years to Adolf Loos’s declaration that ornament is crime, has worked to decouple contemporary practice from what they regard as the filthy claptrap of history. Of course, Modernism itself has self-evidently become historical in its own right, and the more this is true, paradoxically, the more its defenders insist that history does not matter. Whatever else this represents in the form of intellectual imprudence, it at least promotes a discontinuity of human experience which cannot be healthy.