Jane Jacobs New Urbanism

Towards the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, a new form of urban thinking and rationalization made its way into the world of urban planning. This way of reinterpreting urban planning was known as New Urbanism, and throughout the following years until present, New Urbanism became a new way of thinking about urban planning, revolving around ideals of pedestrian-oriented societies, as well as a need for diversity among its social and economic aspects. These ideas encompassed old urban concepts like the City Beautiful Movement and Garden City as well as incorporating more modern perceptions, such as a need for civic engagement and the need to incorporate the use of public transportation into plans. The New Urbanism movement was made up of a group

Though it was taken from older ideals, it was a way of looking at cities in a way that valued the people and giving them opportunities to establish community bonds and to have a sense of ease within the communities. Having an emphasis on “walkable neighborhoods…something from charter” allowed for more civic engagement among community members and allowed people to get to know their neighbors and families around them rather than racing to get in their cars and go some distance too far to walk. Another large portion of New Urbanism’s claims was that most of the theorists saw a need for diversity in uses of commercial as well as non-commercial relation. This hints to ideas of Jane Jacobs in her ideas of what diversity in a city and urban area entailed, when she claimed that “something about buildings needing variation in uses, primary uses.” She claimed a need for buildings to have variation in uses as well as age, which seems to be part of the ideals of the New Urbanist movement. It provided for diversity economically as well as socially, something Jacobs advocated for in order for a community to be successful. As a whole, the New Urbanist movement was one that although the country did not know was necessary, was. At the time, suburban areas as well as urban were losing their draw, and people were starting to get sick of the auto-oriented communities. The problem with New Urbanism was that it was not wholly a new idea, it