Premodern, Modern, Postmodern (Placing New Urbanism Into A Historical Perspective)

Journal of Planning History
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Premodern, Modern, Postmodern? Placing New Urbanism into a Historical

Perspective
Sonia A. Hirt
Journal of Planning History 2009 8: 248 originally published online 2 August 2009
DOI: 10.1177/1538513209338902
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Premodern, Modern, Postmodern?
Placing New Urbanism into a Historical
Perspective
Sonia A. Hirt
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
This study explores New Urbanism as part of a contemporary cultural paradigm

referred to as postmodernism. By highlighting the complex relationship between
New Urbanist design prescriptions and earlier urban development approaches from
the premodern and modern periods, I reflect on some seemingly paradoxical aspects
of both New Urbanism and postmodernism. Specifically, I argue that whereas New
Urbanism rejects the key design tenets of modernist planning and strives to revive
premodern urban forms (and in this sense qualifies as “postmodern”), it contradicts
one of the foundational premises of postmodern thought—the commitment to plu-
ralism. I further argue that this contradiction relates to a fundamental challenge
facing New Urbanists planners: how to achieve premodern urban design ideals
within the economic and technological conditions of contemporary society. I illus-
trate these themes and contradictions with examples of historic and recent planning
in the Cleveland region.
Keywords: New Urbanism; modernism; postmodernism; Cleveland
O
ver the past couple of decades, New Urbanism has established
itself as one of the leading urban planning and design movements
in the United States. There are already hundreds of neighbor-
hoods and communities designed following the New Urbanist principles,
as outlined in the Charter of the New Urbanism and other key New
Urbanist texts.1 The movement’s influence, however, is much broader in
that its urban design ideals (e.g., walkable, mixed-use, and, ostensibly,
historically sensitive built forms) have become an important part of con-
temporary planning discourse and practice,2 and have been echoed in
many professional credos3 and some federal government programs4 for
over a decade. Despite (or perhaps because of) its popularity,
New Urbanism has attracted numerous scholarly critiques. As Robert
Beauregard put it, the New Urbanist philosophical doctrines are highly
controversial and suffer from “a chronic ambiguity.”5 One obvious contro-
versy is embedded in the New Urbanist claims to solve the social, eco-
nomic, and environmental problems of the present and the future by
JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 8, No. 3, August 2009 248-273

DOI: 10.1177/1538513209338902
 2009 Sage Publications
Hirt / PREMODERN, MODERN, POSTMODERN? 249
denouncing the design tenets of New Urbanism’s predecessor, modernism,

and by embracing ideals inspired by an idyllic image of premodernity. The
Janus-faced nature of New Urbanism was well captured by Leon Krier—
one of the movement’s founders—in his 1981 article “Forward Comrades,
We Must Go Back.”6
The historic roots of New Urbanism have been extensively analyzed.
The New Urbanists acknowledge building on a number of earlier planning
movements.7 Yet many analysts believe that the New Urbanist “forward-
into-the-past” approach is premised on a rather tormented interpretation
of history. For example, scholars have shown that the New Urbanist pro-
ponents admit their intellectual debts to earlier planning movements
selectively and ignore some “inconvenient” parallels with historic para-
digms that sought social exclusion;8 that the New Urbanist reconstruction
of history has a distinctively upper-class flavor;9 and that the New Urbanist
nostalgia for good old (premodern) times is hardly a realistic recipe for a
sustainable future.10
This article pursues an alternative historicist agenda. It places the rise
of New Urbanism within the context of broader cultural change—the con-
text of the historic transition from modernism to postmodernism. It
explores how New Urbanism relates to the intellectual premises of mod-
ernism and postmodernism in terms of community design in twentieth-
century America.11
The thesis is as follows. Using a relatively unnuanced definition of post-
modernism as the rejection of modernism’s century-long fix on linear
progress and technocratic reason, paired with a certain “infatuation with
the [pre-modern] past,” then New Urbanism constitutes a textbook case
of “postmodern urbanism”12—the type of urbanism that seeks to restore
precisely these qualities of premodern urbanity (compactness, mixed
uses, walkability, etc.) that twentieth-century modernist planning obliter-
ated. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that New Urbanism tends to pur-
sue such premodern design outcomes with heavy-handed regulatory
mechanisms that are rather reminiscent of modernist planning and run
contrary to postmodernism’s fundamental commitment to pluralism and
diversity. In this sense, New Urbanism exhibits elements of both modern-
ism and postmodernism; as a matter of fact, it illustrates that these two
paradigms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. An inherent challenge
facing the New Urbanist planners is how to create premodern-looking
urban forms within current economic and technological conditions. This
challenge is resolved by embracing modernist-type controls. This is evi-
dent in the literature and promotional discourse of New Urbanism and
examples of New Urbanist developments on the ground.
This study draws on recent developments in the Cleveland region based
on the New Urbanist model as compared to extant remains of Cleveland’s
historic fabric. The three New Urbanist developments in Cleveland’s
250 JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY / August 2009
region include: Beacon Place, the first large New Urbanist housing devel-
opment near downtown Cleveland; Legacy Village, the first large New
Urbanist retail development in the region, located in Lyndhurst; and
Crocker Park, the first large mixed-use New Urbanist development in the
region, located in Westlake.
What is Postmodernism?
It is unlikely that this question, which Charles Jencks posed over

twenty years ago,13 can ever be definitively answered. Postmodernism is
a notoriously convoluted construct. It has been defined as an artistic
style, an epistemological approach, and, in the broader sense, a historic
period (in the latter case, the common term is “postmodernity”).14
Following Frederick Jameson and others,15 it is useful to treat postmod-
ernism as a cultural paradigm that represents a historic shift away from
the ideological and aesthetic doctrines of modernism—the zeitgeist that
dominated Western cultures between the Enlightenment and the “high
modernist” decades of the mid-twentieth century.16 As a cultural para-
digm, postmodernism entails a change in worldview, “a shift in sensibility”17
or a “new state of mind.”18 It challenges a core modernist belief in human-
ity’s ever-growing capacity for material betterment through scientific and
technical innovation, and domination of nature.19 It replaces the modern-
ist fascination with sheer newness, linear progress, machine-like effi-
ciency, and grand, universal styles and solutions (which are well exhibited
in the architecture of the “International Style”), with a sharpened sense
of the need for environmental sustainability, a growing appreciation of
historic traditions, a keen interest in the local and the particular, and a
marked craving for times long gone. The modernist epistemological
approach is based on a search for formal order, discipline, and hierarchy,
and reduces complex systems to their simple subparts.20 In contrast, the
postmodern approach advocates a more holistic way of knowing.21
One of the most-cited definitions of postmodernism is Jean-Francois
Lyotard’s view that it expresses “incredulity toward meta-narratives.”22 It
implies skepticism toward universal formulas and a suspicion of recipes for
improvement premised on claims for certainty and predictability. The mod-
ernist logic embraces totalizing visions such as Marxism’s claim for the exis-
tence of global laws of historic materialism.23 In contrast, the postmodern
logic embraces a multiplicity of views, a world of uncertainty and spontaneity,
eclecticism and choice.24 Postmodernism is thus deconstructive (of singular
truths), antifoundationalist, and nondualistic (in rejecting simple hierarchies
and dichotomies). It values not unity, but plurality and difference.25
Cultural paradigms, however, do not succeed each other in a linear, dis-
continuous fashion (in fact, to assert the opposite would be modernist). On
the contrary, a new paradigm merely makes traits that were that were once
subordinate become dominant.26 For instance, Anthony Giddens describes
the “dual trajectory” of modernity comprising the “objective” exact sci-
ences and the “subjective” humanities, the latter becoming more promi-
nent in postmodern times.27 Nan Ellin points to Romanticism, a period
defined by a search for spontaneity in the arts and a sense of nostalgia for
the medieval, as an early revolt against modernism; she suggests that post-
modernism is a “Romantic resurgence.”28
There are other modern–postmodern temporal and conceptual overlaps,
but the key point is articulated by Lyotard. If postmodernism embraces all
views, how can it resolutely reject the ones that make the modern outlook?
Can a postmodernist denounce the modern ways with certainty (wouldn’t
that be modernist)? If to be postmodern is to value difference (e.g., value
the rights of those who once had no rights, such as nature), how can this
value be preserved if not everybody shares it? To ensure postmodern
choices, should postmodernists force them and thus fall back on using the
modern means (e.g., enforce strict laws for nature protection)?29
New Urbanism as (Part of) Planning’s Postmodernity
David Harvey contends that modernism in planning took the form of

vast-scale, scientifically prepared, and technologically efficient master
plans—planning’s own meta-narrative30—backed by no-frills architec-
ture.31 Modernist planning produced two chief products: downtowns
“renewed” in a Corbusian, “towers-in-the park” fashion, and sprawling
mono-functional suburbs. Regardless of the obvious contrasts between
them, these urban forms developed out of common assumptions: e.g., cit-
ies are too dense and urban decentralization is desirable; cities are messy
and must be ordered by separating land uses and traffic modes; new
urban forms are superior to old ones; there are universal planning prin-
ciples much as there are universal (international) architectural styles;
and the scale of cities must be adjusted to modern technologies by stan-
dardizing construction methods and building highways, ample parking,
and superblocks in lieu of traditional streets.32 Such planning adhered to
modernist ideals (and Fordist economic and technological conditions) of
progress, order, economies of scale, and mass production.33
New Urbanism rejects these modernist ideas. Prominent New Urbanists
(e.g., Peter Calthorpe,34 Leon Krier,35 Andres Duany, and Elizabeth Plater-
Zyberk36) view modernism as an enemy of good urban form. The tenets of
good city-making, as outlined in the Charter of New Urbanism,37 include
compact forms with defined edges, a pedestrian scale, mixed uses, tradi-
tional streetscapes, and, ostensibly, rich stylistic references to the local
built heritage—a set of tenets that makes an almost perfect antithesis of
“high modernism.” The New Urbanists claim that their design prescrip-
tions will bring a more environmentally sustainable and socially equitable
future. Yet they are inspired by premodern, old European and early
American experiences, from medieval and colonial towns through the
eighteenth-century picturesque to the early twentieth-century Arts and
Crafts movement. The New Urbanists proclaim a certain taste for the vari-
ety and idiosyncrasy found in premodern towns38 (even though they have
been heavily influenced by the City Beautiful and the Garden City move-
ments, which share the modernist desire to impose order on urban
forms).39 Thus, if to be postmodern means to be antimodern and cherish
an imaginary, charming premodern past, New Urbanism is a good case of
postmodern urbanism,40 even if the New Urbanists themselves may dis-
agree with the label.41
As Beauregard and others have noted,42 where the New Urbanists
exhibit a modernist tendency is in the certainty with which they denounce
high modernism, in the certainty with which they advocate their own
tenets of good form as undeniably right,43 and in the willingness to employ
heavy-handed regulatory (i.e., modernist) tools to build the “good forms.”
In this sense, New Urbanism is an excellent example of the postmodern
contradiction of imposing postmodern values (and premodern looks)
by using the modern means—the contradiction outlined in the previous
section.
A brief look at select New Urbanist texts and practices reveals this con-
tradiction well. Consider, for example, Krier’s writings. He proclaims ide-
als of maturity (i.e., historicism and contextualism), proximity and
connectivity (i.e., mixed use and pedestrian scale), and complex dia-
logues of form and inclusiveness (i.e., pluralism) as they are displayed in
preindustrial towns that developed organically before the birth of vilified
twentieth-century modernist planning. Yet he proposes to achieve these
ideals by setting up a clear hierarchy of forms (centers, quarters, edges)
and imposing limits on town growth and building height—hardly an anti-
modernist recipe to achieve premodern town charm.44
A similar approach is displayed, say, in Duany’s specific programs for
reforming modernist planning. In lieu of modernist zoning, which strictly
segregates the land uses, Duany advocates the transect code, which osten-
sibly categorizes zones based on form instead of land use.45 Whereas
transect zoning may solve many issues that its predecessor created, it
remains strict zoning per se—an invasive, modernist-type tool for control.
Furthermore, it does not even permit a variety of uses throughout the city.
Only two of its six zones, the urban core and the urban center, qualify as
truly mixed-use. A suburban edge zone permits only single-family detached
homes with restricted office and retail uses. The endorsement of pluralism
in urban functions, which can be found in almost any New Urbanist pro-
grammatic text, is thus mostly rhetorical; in practical terms, the result is
a carefully controlled environment with only a limited mixture of uses.46
The strict, extraordinarily detailed design guidelines displayed in pat-

tern books that accompany landmark New Urbanist developments like
Celebration and Seaside, Florida, are an even more extreme example.
Celebration’s pattern book, for instance, claims that it does not “limit
possibilities” but “enable[s] builders and architects to build a rich variety
of houses”47 Yet it is hard to interpret the complex matrix it creates for
six “appropriate” architectural styles, each discussed under six headings
related to specific design elements (e.g., porches, doors and windows,
materials) applied at six different neighborhood types, as anything but a
rather rigid, authoritative attempt to control, if not preempt, diversity.
Little, if any, of the proclaimed passion for spontaneity can be found in
the pattern book.
The New Urbanists seem oblivious that their praise of premodern
urban charm and spontaneity and their verbal enthusiasm for diversity of
uses and styles contradict their attempts to limit diversity in practice.
One leading New Urbanist, for example, praised Seaside as follows: “It is
a little community whose chief planner was not Robert Davis or Andres
Duany or Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk but, secretly, Aristotle,” an allusion to
the Aristotelian idea of typologies of diversity rather than “Platonic abso-
lute types.”48 Yet, in the very same volume, a few pages later, another
prominent New Urbanist declared that regulation (i.e., the outlawing of
undesirable types) is at the heart of New Urbanist work.49
It may be possible to critique “star” New Urbanists like Krier50 and
Duany51 for “hypocrisy” and attribute this contradiction to the inflated
ego and obsessive desire to control on the part of the “star” designer. But
it is more useful to highlight the contradiction as inherent to the New
Urbanist attempts to rhetorically embrace pluralism of architectural
forms, yet at the same time control it. This contradiction arises, in part,
from the difficulty that New Urbanist planning encounters when trying to
create premodern-looking forms within current economic and techno-
logical conditions. In this sense, it is an inherently postmodern contradic-
tion, which is illustrated through examination of several New Urbanist
developments in the Cleveland area in the following sections.
Premodern and Modern Urbanism in Cleveland
Founded in 1796 by surveyors from Connecticut, Cleveland was laid out

on a grid with a central Public Square modeled after the town squares of
New England. Phenomenal industrial growth during the nineteenth cen-
tury rendered untenable any attempts to impose strict order on the city.
Aside from expanding the street system in loose alliance with the original
grid, Cleveland, like other fast-growing industrial cities at the time, grew
in a haphazard and high-density fashion.52 The most ambitious effort to
reconstruct the city, or at least its center, in a planned manner came in
Figure 1: Map of the county surrounding the City of Cleveland. The map shows the location of
the neighborhoods, suburbs, and developments referred to in the article.
Author: Phillip Gabathuler
1903 with Daniel Burnham’s renowned Group Plan—only the second City
Beautiful plan in the country (Washington, D.C.’s was the first).53
By the early twentieth century, Cleveland’s most desirable neighbor-
hoods were, arguably, Hough and Fairfax on the east side (see figure 1).
Both were settled first in the late 1700s to early 1800s, annexed by the
city in the 1860s to 1870s, rose to their peak of prosperity in the 1920s
and 1930s, and then fell into severe disrepair from the 1940s on.54
Hough and Fairfax exemplify Cleveland’s historic community fabric.
Both are located about four miles east of Cleveland’s downtown, along
Euclid Avenue, which Clevelanders once claimed as their Champs-
Elysees.55 The first homes in the area were modest log- and timber-frame
structures. Residential construction intensified after city annexation and
continued unabated until the 1920s. By that time, the area boasted some
of the most magnificent mansions in Cleveland, as well as expensive shop-
ping, many remarkable churches and exclusive private schools, and sev-
eral important entertainment and institutional facilities such as League
Park and the Cleveland Clinic. There were, however, also working-class
streets lined by less pretentious single-, two-, and multifamily homes.
Euclid was the neighborhoods’ “Main Street” (see figures 2 and 3), but
there were many other thriving corridors, such as Cedar and Quincy,
where corner stores, mixed-used structures, and single-family housing
were situated. The mixed-use character of the area was unaffected by
Cleveland’s first zoning code from 1929, which separated residential from
Figure 2: A neighborhood main street: Euclid Avenue at 105th Street (Hough’s western border)
as it looked about the year 1900. This is the south side of the street, made of multifam-
ily housing and first-floor stores. Further down are smaller retail buildings and single-
family homes.
Source: Reproduced with permission from the Cleveland Public Library.
business uses, since the code did not outlaw existing mixed-use areas. In
fact, the mixed-use character persisted for several decades, even after the
neighborhoods fell into severe disrepair following the infamous Hough
riots in 1966. A retail inventory of Hough carried out in the early 1980s
found 128 small businesses along the neighborhood streets.56
The character of residential architecture in the area is extremely
diverse, although there certainly are a number of common elements in
both architectural massing and site layout. A study of built patterns in
Fairfax prepared by Urban Development Associates in the mid-1990s
found that most lots are about forty feet wide, front setbacks average ten
to fifteen feet, and the level of porches, front lines, trims, bay windows,
and eave lines is remarkably consistent.57 The study further noted that
even though many homes were ordered from the mail-order housing
catalogues that were popular in the late nineteenth to early twentieth
century,58 individual builders must have gone to great lengths to align
design elements in homes that otherwise have such different architec-
tural scales and details. Regardless of these commonalities, however, both
Hough and Fairfax show an eclectic mix of styles, including Queen Anne,
Colonial Revival, Georgian Revival, Italienate, Classic Revival, Tudor
Revival, Prairie, and Shingle styles. As one walks through the neighbor-
hoods’ streets, many scarred with empty lots and dilapidated buildings, it
is hard to find any two homes that look the same (see figure 4).59
Figure 3: The other side of Euclid Avenue in 1896. These mixed-use buildings contain grocery,
grain, wood, feed, and coal businesses. The buildings are of a very different scale as
compared to those across the street. Old Euclid has none of the “contrived” variety of
styles and scales of the New Urbanist “main streets” that it inspired.
Source: Reproduced with permission from the Cleveland Public Library.
Housing deterioration began to take hold in Hough and Fairfax as early

as the 1930s. Over the next decades, material conditions worsened, with
middle-class white residents leaving the area en masse.60 The proportion
of African American residents rose sharply: in 1950, 5 percent of the
residents of Hough and 14 percent of the residents of Fairfax were non-
white; by 1960, the percentage of nonwhite residents in both neighbor-
hoods climbed to approximately 75. The residential exodus continued in
the 1970s and 1980s. In 1990, the neighborhoods’ populations were only
one-quarter to one-third of their 1960 levels. Housing values and house-
hold incomes fell to less than half of the city averages.61
Municipal efforts to revitalize Cleveland’s historic fabric in Hough,
Fairfax, and elsewhere by restructuring it according to modernist ideals
followed the city’s first General Plan in 1949. The plan had little good to
say about the architecture of old neighborhoods, labeling them the “not so
good residential areas.” It used photos to contrast how undesirably com-
pact these neighborhoods were, as compared to “modern” buildings set far
back from the street and each other. The plan lamented the typical mix of
homes, stores, and small factories, and proposed to “weed them out.” In
fact, it argued that “this jumble of homes, stores, and factories . . . is the
Figure 4: An older residential street in Fairfax.
result of no planning” and defined planning as an activity that “separates

the different uses of land.” The plan also sought to “modernize” the his-
toric districts by supplying them with vast parking and large green spac-
es.62 In line with these prescriptions, Hough and Fairfax were destined for
“corrective action.”63
The General Plan laid the foundation for several other planning propos-
als for downtown64 and other districts, proposals that espoused similar
principles for “modernizing” the historic fabric. Ultimately, it served as
the basis for the most ambitious Urban Renewal program in the country,
which designated one-eighth of the total urban area for demolition.65 In
the end, only parts of the program were implemented. Through the 1950s,
Hough and Fairfax actually experienced less clearance than some abut-
ting neighborhoods, such as Central and Kinsman, but they attracted
hundreds of these neighborhoods’ fleeing residents, thus prompting fur-
ther middle-class exodus, housing abandonment, and decay.66
Further proposals for “fixing” the area came from various nonprofit
groups67 followed by other city programs68 and federal money for job
training and other social services, especially after the 1966 riots.69 Funds
were also channeled for some limited housing renovation and new con-
struction. In terms of business revitalization, plans from the 1970s and
early 1980s continued to bemoan the presence of scattered small stores
and envisioned “modern,” consolidated shopping centers with ample

parking,70 as well as large modernist institutional structures in super-
blocks and in campus-like settings.71
Postmodern Urbanism: Beacon Place
Since the late 1980s, Hough and Fairfax have undergone some visible
revitalization. By that time, Cleveland’s planning had undergone a full
paradigm shift: recent master plans embrace—rather than denounce—the
high-density, mixed-use nature of the historic neighborhoods.72 New devel-
opments in Hough and Fairfax include many individually built single-
family homes; Lexington Village, with over two hundred new residences;
and Church Square, a strip mall of one hundred thousand square feet along
Euclid.73 Church Square was planned as the first phase of a larger project,
which was to serve as an anchor of the neighborhoods’ revival.74 Completed
in 1993, it is the largest new retail node in the area in forty years.75
A second residential phase of the Church Square project brought in
Beacon Place, a self-described New Urbanist development of about one
hundred small-lot, single-family homes and townhouses completed in
1996.76 Commercial success warranted expansion: another one hundred
high-density, urban-type homes, Woodhaven Villas, have been added to
the area.77
Beacon Place was designed by City Architecture,78 one of the leading
architectural firms in Cleveland, headed by P. Volpe, a long-time member
of the Congress of New Urbanism.79 Recipient of numerous awards and
hailed as the catalyst for Cleveland’s east-side renaissance,80 Beacon Place
reflected in its design the defining elements of a New Urbanist commu-
nity: narrow lots,81 small setbacks (including zero lot lines in front of the
townhouses), gabled roofs, bay windows, and front porches (see figures 5,
6, and 7). Walking through its neat and pleasant streets, one cannot help
feeling a sense of relief at its difference from the surrounding sea of faded
Victorian homes and vacant lots (even if that contrast feels a bit surreal).
The development was built following a set of strict design guidelines.82
According to the interviews, they were prepared after “analysis of the
neighborhood architecture,” with the intent of fitting into the architec-
tural context of the community and, as one interviewed city planner put
it, “bring[ing] back that early-twentieth-century neighborhood feel.”
To what extent does the Beacon Place project architecturally fit into
the neighborhood? Beacon Place is an instantly made city block, adjacent
to another super-block made of commercial strips. Certainly, in terms of
density, lot sizes, and open-to-built ratios, it has the makings of an urban
neighborhood; its streets could be pedestrian—it has good-sized side-
walks, and the two-car garages are tastefully hidden along the back
Figure 5: The site plan of Beacon Place (the large buildings on the left are the Church Square strip
malls). As the plan shows, the development is made of neatly organized high-density
residential buildings.
Source: Reproduced with permission from City Architecture.
Figure 6: Beacon Place’s townhouses.
streets. But still, there is something incongruent about it. The incongruity
comes from the fact that none of the historic residential landscapes in the
immediate vicinity is a single-stroke development outlined in a clear-cut,
unitary site plan like Beacon Place. The development’s streets, flanked by
pleasant, simplified, and somewhat smaller versions of the historic Queen
Anne and Shingle Styles, bring little of the eclecticism in style, color, or
Figure 7: Beacon Place’s single-family homes.
mass that one finds in the nearby old neighborhood. There is a look of
sameness and predictability in Beacon Place, which is not a part of the
original built fabric of either Hough or Fairfax (the new extension,
Woodhaven Villas, is even more monotonous, since land prices increased
after Beacon Place’s success and the developer had to lower building
costs). The development is solely residential; there are no corner stores
since they are strictly prohibited by zoning. According to the interviews,
half of Beacon Place’s residents work in the Cleveland Clinic or other
nearby offices and can easily bike, take the bus, or walk there. Yet it is
unclear to what extent residents walk even to the adjacent Church Square
shopping center (no one was walking during a site visit). One academic
interviewed said he doubts many shop at Church Square: “It doesn’t have
the kind of imported feta cheese they like.”
Legacy Village
If Beacon Place at least strives to integrate into the local architectural

context, Legacy Village, the region’s first large retail New Urbanist devel-
opment, does not have to try—there is nothing to integrate with. It is a
formerly green sixty-seven-acre site that is accessible only by car from the
center of the City of Lyndhurst (even though it is just two miles outside
that city). Lyndhurst is a small historic community and now an inner-ring

suburb on Cleveland’s east side (see figure 1). Designed by Dorsky
Hodgson Partners, a firm with strong New Urbanist leanings,83 Legacy
Village was completed in 2003 to include 650,000 square feet of retail and
some office space. It has since become an economic powerhouse. Its
award-winning design84 was ostensibly inspired by the local architectural
heritage (hence the name “Legacy”).
Legacy Village is organized around a main street flanked by colorful
brick and stucco facades, mostly in the Italianate style. It is advertised for
its “unique synergy found in mixed-use environments” and for being
“built around a framework of city blocks, all in a multilevel Main Street
configuration,”85 as well as for its “contextual sensitivity to historic origi-
nal structures” and “its unique blend” of eclecticism.86 The Urban Land
Institute cited it as an exemplar of mixed-use community.87 Yet there is
nothing mixed-use about it; no one lives in the “village”; most buildings
have fake upper residential floors. It is a walkable, pedestrian place only
after one gets to it by car; the main-street stores—all of which are chain
enterprises—are surrounded by asphalt (see figure 8). In fact, the market-
ing video on the architectural firm’s Web site shows a Jeep driving some
distance before it enters the “village” to unload its passengers.88
Like in Beacon Place, one of greatest design challenges was how to
engineer diverse architecture, how to “recreate a timeline of styles that
are traditionally created over a long period of time,” as one interviewee
put it. “[T]he idea,” as the interviewee continued, “was to make the kind
of mix of styles that might have been [italics added] built in an old
Midwestern town or a town in New England” and find a way to “add a
mystery” to the overall design. The goal was achieved by drafting a set of
guidelines that prescribe historic references and require “desirable” sty-
listic deviations, and then assign the different buildings to different archi-
tects in the firm. But the much sought-after diversity of styles is lacking.
The buildings appear as if they were created as large shells and only later
divided into colorful subparts—which in fact was the case (see figure 9).
Little in Legacy Village evokes the variety of old Euclid Avenue, or of the
main streets of any of Cleveland’s historic suburbs, whether Lyndhurst,
Shaker Heights, or Cleveland Heights.
Crocker Park
Crocker Park is the largest mixed-use New Urbanist development in

Northeast Ohio. It is located in Westlake, an affluent outer-ring suburb of
Cleveland, about fifteen miles west of the city’s downtown (see figure 1).
According to local interviews, Crocker Park was conceived to provide
business opportunities in what was once a largely residential community
Figure 8: The site plan of Legacy Village. The site plan resembles that of a regular (i.e., “modernist”)
regional mall.
Source: Reproduced with permisson from Dorsky Hodgson Partners.
http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx
and to serve as a major boost to Westlake’s tax base by drawing on a

regional clientele. In addition, Westlake—once a “typical suburb that
lacked any sort of a real town center,” as one planner put it—aimed to
develop “the type of a pedestrian main street that one could find in older
American towns back in the pre-automobile era.” Asked how Crocker
Park has improved the quality of Westlake, interviewees agreed that it
serves as a main-street-type “gathering place,” attracting people from
Westlake, as well as from all over the region.
Opened in 2005, Crocker Park covers seventy-five acres (twelve city
blocks) with 170,000 square feet of built space. Half the built space is for
residential uses; instead of Legacy Village’s fake residential floors,89
Crocker Park offers five hundred housing units above the commercial
spaces.90 Although it borders an older, large commercial strip on one side
and is separated from the surrounding residential areas by busy roads and
wide green buffers, it is certainly far more accessible to local residents
than Legacy Village. Crocker Park was designed by Bialosky and
Partners—a respected firm with offices in Cleveland and New York, which
subscribes to “traditional town planning along with the crafted principles
of the New Urbanism.”91 The firm’s Web site depicts Crocker Park as a
main-street-type environment “dedicated to the principles of new urban-
ism;” it also cites a list of ecologically sensitive building methods that
earned it a Sierra Club Award for Walkable Communities.92
Figure 9: Main Street at Legacy Village. http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx
Crocker Park adheres closely to the New Urbanist tenets. It is a high-

density, vibrant place that, unlike Beacon Place, bustles with people at all
hours of the day. Unlike Legacy Village, where everyone must arrive by
car, Crocker Park seems to attract visitors who come on bike or by foot
from the surrounding subdivisions. Regardless of Crocker Park’s merits,
however, it is difficult to agree either with the city planner who argued
that “This is it! The traditional, lively, walkable main street that our
towns once had!” or with the developer who believed it represents a
“return to authenticity.”93 Crocker Park’s architectural diversity was pre-
scribed by strict standards for five styles: Shingle, Tudor, Romanesque,
French Country, and Classic Revival, references to which were then care-
fully blended. Since Westlake has few historic buildings, examples of
“authentic” architecture came mostly from Cleveland and its older sub-
urbs, but also from Buffalo and Boston.94 Architecturally, Crocker Park—
like Legacy Village—has a feeling of artificial authenticity. As in Legacy
Village, most buildings in Crocker Place are super-shells later split into
subparts (see figures 10 and 11). The functional makeup is carefully con-
trolled: on one side, there is only residential on top of retail; on another
side, there is only retail or only office. Asked whether these uses could be
changed, an interviewee noted:
Figure 10: Crocker’s Park site plan: the buildings are color-coded to reflect the carefully arranged
land uses, each put in its “right place.”
Source: Reproduced with permission from Bialosky and Partners.
http://www.bialosky.com/index.cfm/portfolio/commercial/Crocker_Park_-_Westlake
Well, no, I mean the uses are kind of already set. We are responsible planners, so I think
we have tried to put everything in the right place. I mean we get paid to do that, I think.
So you will see that all residential faces residential and all office faces office.95
Asked whether there are people who live above their place of work,
a planner pointed out that the “economics of the place make such
main-street-type of living and working arrangement difficult.” In other
words, the people employed in the sixty-eight first-floor chain stores, which
Crocker Park proudly hosts, cannot afford the upper-level housing.96
Discussion and Conclusions
The three developments reviewed above have received much publicity

in Northeast Ohio; all are arguably successful cases of New Urbanist devel-
opment. The three are quite different types: one is a residential commu-
nity in a distressed city neighborhood; one is a retail node in an inner-ring
suburb; and the third and largest one, located in an outer-ring suburb, is
the sole example of a newly built mixed-use environment around Cleveland.
The architectural makeup of the three projects, however, shows many
Figure 11: Crocker Park, from the Banana Republic to Barnes and Noble.
common features, from the narrow streets to the explicit references to

historic aesthetics. These features are clearly opposite to the tenets of
modernist urban design, in Cleveland and elsewhere. They are ostensibly
inspired, to use the words of local interviewees, by the “lively, walkable,
traditional main street”; they seek to “bring back that early-twentieth-
century neighborhood feel.” The rejection of modernist design ideals and
the appreciation of the physical structure of old neighborhoods were
shared by both architects and planners. Asked to list the ingredients of
“bad” urban form, they responded in similar terms, pointing to staple
items inherited from the modernist era such as “too much parking,”
“buildings that are too far apart,” “monotony,” and “lack of human scale.”
The question of what makes “good” urban form evoked equally uniform
responses; all praised “old towns” and “old main streets” with their
“pedestrianism,” “diversity of textures,” “street enclosure,” and “mixed
uses.” If one takes these responses at face value, the shift from modern to
postmodern urbanism, in Ellin’s terms,97 seems nearly complete.
A closer look at the three communities, however, leads to a different
interpretation. Are they really nonmodernist; do they bring the feel of
“old town”? The answer is less definitive. To begin with, all three
developments are precisely what the term “developments” implies:

they are “projects,” single-stroke, relatively large-scale endeavors that
stand in obvious contrast to the much more fragmented development
pattern of historic areas. The old, premodern neighborhood that New
Urbanists like to refer to was—as historians like Robert Fishman have
described it98—a mix and medley of uses, scales, and styles that were
built over time, by many different hands. This may be truer for pre-
modern European towns than for American cities developed on a grid,
which by the late nineteenth century clearly showed the imprint of
modernist standardization of construction (e.g., the home mail-order
catalogues). Still, any look at photographs of old Euclid and any walk
through Hough or Fairfax indicates that instantly built neighborhood
creations are rather hard to find.99
Because the New Urbanists developments are ready-made, their archi-
tects, in a noble effort to avoid the despised modernist flaw of mass-
produced monotony, have to stage the spontaneity, design the diversity,
and produce the pluralism of styles, scales, and functions. Asked to
articulate the greatest challenge in designing Beacon Place, an inter-
viewed architect shared the following:
By all means, how to make it all look different! You have to understand that we had
only, I think, three floor plans to work with—I mean, the developer is saying this is
the only way this project will work. I mean obviously they [developers] benefit from
this because it cuts the cost substantially. Well, how to have three plans and make
it look like you don’t? But I think if you walk around, you wouldn’t really know it
today. You couldn’t tell that there were only three plans. But it took a lot of effort, I
tell you, to make them look different. The design guidelines that we put together
really helped us in this. I can’t precisely remember now, but I think we made a rule
that the colors and the roof shapes, and some of the details like the railings, could
only be repeated every third house.
This dilemma of how to produce pluralism was well predicted by Jane

Jacobs. Where cityscapes are built not incrementally over time but
instantly under a single plan, she said, planners will “contrive differ-
ences”: make a catalogue of eye-catching stylistic deviations and then
force them.100 (She found this approach unsatisfactory.101) Producing the
land-use mix that New Urbanists so admire is another conundrum: it
must be either forced (Crocker Park) or faked (Legacy Village). A planner
explained the difficulty as follows:
The problem is that it [mixed use] won’t happen by itself. First, lenders are more
reluctant to finance it because they are used to residential, or office, or retail.
Furthermore, it is hard to have anyone, who works in retail in a place like this, with
the means to live upstairs . . . Add to this that the whole thing was up in the air
because the residents in the subdivisions around were against it, so they only agreed
to it once the developer agreed to separate it from their houses by a buffer. So,
unless you had people dedicated to the idea of mixed use to the point that it gets
written into the code, it would never have happened.
The New Urbanist plurality of styles and uses has an almost paradoxical
quality to it. It is required, yet restrained. Regulations are put in place to
mandate it, but also to control it. Design codes postulate it, yet limit it to
a few acceptable styles; zoning codes ordain it, yet prevent it from spread-
ing beyond the few preselected areas. The outcome does not look quite
like modernist no-frills architecture, but it has little to do with the “med-
ley of the [traditional] neighborhood.”102 It is premised on rejecting mod-
ernist homogeneity but reflects a modernist dedication to certainty and
predictability. It displays little interest in serendipity and eclecticism,
little “incredulity” toward order and meta-prescriptions.103
The projects are fitting examples of Fordist, mass-produced urbanism
even if they are designed not to look like it.104 Their designers struggled to
make them look premodern: give the repetitive floor layouts different
facades, mandate the stylistic diversity, and make ready-made streetscapes
yet evoke the succession of architectural styles that in times past would
have been built over many decades. The projects are then modernist
frames made to look almost pluralist, almost mixed-use, almost pedes-
trian, and almost premodern. They simulate what “might have been.”105They
are then “double-coded,” modern and premodern. And this happens to be
a good definition of postmodernism, as Jencks would have it.106
There is no point in blaming the designers for the “almost” quality: all
recognized the limitations of their projects.107 The question is whether
the “old neighborhood” and the “old main street” they refer to can serve
as useful models for planners. The admired features of “old towns”—
compactness, density, walkability, mixture, unique aesthetics—were the
result of economic and technological inevitability. They existed out of
necessity: not because the “old-town” residents found them charming or
ecologically responsible, but because this is how they could build.
Scott Campbell posed the problem of looking forward by looking back
as follows:
The key difference between those indigenous, sustainable communities and ours is
that they had no choice but to be sustainable. Bluntly stated, if they cut down too
many trees or ruined the soil, they would die out. Modern society has the options
presented by trade, long-term storage, and synthetic replacements; if we clear-cut a
field, we have subsequent options that our ancestors didn’t. In this situation, we
must voluntarily choose sustainable practices, since there is no immediate survival
or market imperative to do so.108
The postmodern vision of urban compactness, mixture and pedestrian-

ism is not inevitable. The economic and technological conditions that
enabled modernist urbanity—spread-out, mass-produced, homogeneous,
land-use-segregated, automobile-friendly forms—are still present and, for
many, apparently still appealing. The building industry is still composed
of large, specialized firms that can conquer new land and erect standard-
ized malls and subdivisions cheaply, no matter how they are made to look.
In the absence of “immediate survival or market imperative,” in Campbell’s
words, changing the paradigm requires a conscious choice—but a choice

not everyone wants. This is, again, the postmodern dilemma: to ensure
postmodern choices, must we then force them the modern way?
To their credit, the New Urbanists are trying to make the choice of
compact, mixed, walkable forms more appealing and more available. And
in a postmodern twist, they force it where they can and fake it where they
can’t. If New Urbanism is a postmodern primer, then postmodernism is by
choice what pre-modernism was by necessity. It is the choice to walk to
work when driving is faster; the choice to buy local, when global imports
are cheaper; the choice to recycle, when discarding is easier; the choice
to forego cookie-cutter architecture, when building it is more efficient.
But if there is any good news in high energy costs, failing markets, col-
lapsing housing prices, and rising earth temperatures, it is that planners
and builders may confront the necessity to begin creating only compact,
transit-oriented, mixed-use forms or face market extinction, as nobody
will be able or willing to choose their alternative. Perhaps this will be the
new “New Urbanism.” And then, in a historic shift, we will have entered
truly a world of post-postmodern planning.
Acknowledgement
The author thanks the editor and the referees, as well as Dr. Max
Stephenson and Dr. Julie Steiff, for their comments on earlier drafts. She
is also very grateful to the architects and planners who kindly agreed to
be interviewed for this paper.
Notes
1. At the time of writing, the Congress for the New Urbanism’s project database lists about two
hundred “official” New Urbanist developments in the United States. See http://www.cnu.org/search/
projects (accessed February 13, 2009). However, the actual number is several times higher, if one
counts all developments (including urban infill projects) in the country which are influenced by New
Urbanist ideals (e.g., J. Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and
Practice, London: Routledge, 2005).
2. Grant, Planning the Good Community.
3. For example, see Planning Advisory Service Report no. 479: The Principles of Smart
Development (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1998). More recently, the American Planning
Association cooperated with the Congress for the New Urbanism to co-author and co-publish
Planning Advisory Service Report no. 526: Codifying New Urbanism—How to Reform Municipal
Land Development Regulations (Chicago: Congress for the New Urbanism and the American
Planning Association, 2004).
4. For collaboration between the Congress for the New Urbanism and the U.S. Department of
Housing and Urban Development, for example, see Principles for Inner City Neighborhood Design,
2000, http://www.huduser.org/publications/pubasst/principle.html (accessed February 13, 2009).
5. R. Beauregard, “New Urbanism: Ambiguous Certainties,” Journal of Architectural and
Planning Research 19, no. 3 (2002): 181-94 (p. 182).
6. L. Krier, “Forward Comrades, We Must Go Back,” Oppositions 24 (September, 1981): 26-37.
7. E. Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (London:
Routledge, 2005).
8. C. Silver, New Urbanism and Planning History: Back to the Future, Paper presented at the
Biannual Conference of the International Planning History Society, Barcelona, Spain (July 2004).
9. K. Till, “New Urbanism and Nature: Green Marketing and the Neotraditional Community,”
Urban Geography 22, no. 3 (2001): 220-49; and K. Al-Hindi, “The New Urbanism: Where and for
Whom? Investigation of an Emergent Paradigm,” Urban Geography 22, no. 3 (2001): 202-19.
10. J. Saab, “Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow,” Journal of Planning
History 6, no. 3 (2007): 191-213.
11. In this sense, my goal is similar to that of Beauregard in his article “New Urbanism.” However,
I propose a different way to relate New Urbanism to modernism and postmodernism.
12. For example, see N. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
1999), 124-53.
13. C. Jencks, What is Post-modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1989).
14. M. Dear, The Postmodern Urban Condition (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 32-39.
15. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991).
16. J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
17. A. Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1986), 181.
18. V. Havel, “Searching for Something of Value: Man as Observer Increasingly Alienated from
Himself as Being” (speech excerpts), The Buffalo News, July 10, 1994.
19. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1990).
20. G. Stevens, The Reasoning Architect: Mathematics in Science and Design (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1990).
21. C. Spretnak, The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature, and Place in a Hypermodern World
(New York: Routledge, 1999).
22. J-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
23. Scott, Seeing like a State.
24. P. Allmendinger, Planning in Postmodern Times (London: Routledge, 2001), 25-90.
25. B. Milroy, “Into Postmodern Weightlessness,” Journal of Planning Education and Research
10, no. 3 (1991): 181-87.
26. Jameson, Postmodernism.
27. A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990);
see also Beauregard, “New Urbanism.”
28. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, 13-21.
29. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition; see also Allmendinger, Planning in Postmodern Times.
30. R. Beaureagard, “Between Modernity and Postmodernity: The Ambiguous Position of U.S.
Planning,” in Readings in Urban Theory, ed. S. Feinstein and S. Campbell (Malden and Oxford:
Blackwell, 2003), 108-24.
31. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 66-98.
32. These are all well-established principles and assumptions of modernist urban planning, espe-
cially during the mid-twentieth-century “high-modernist” period (Scott, Seeing like a State; and
J. Holston, The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasilia [Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1989]). A. Irvine, for instance, summarizes the modernist principles in a similar fash-
ion in “The Modern/Postmodern Divide in Urban Planning,” University of Toronto Quarterly 62, no.
4 (1993): 474-87. Both Le Corbusier’s and Frank Lloyd Wright’s writings exhibit the modernist plan-
ning assumptions well. See The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover Publications,
1987 [1928]); Concerning Town Planning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948); the Athens
Charter (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1973 [1934]), and the Disappearing City (New York:
Payson, 1932). Of course, modernism is a very broad and complicated movement and does neatly fit
into narrow definitions. Furthermore, recent literature on “vernacular modernism,” for instance,
refutes the common assertion that modernism sought to obliterate local historic traditions in favor
of the International Style (M. Umbach and B. Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat,
Globalization, and the Built Environment [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005]).
33. P. Filion, “Rupture or Continuity? Modern and Postmodern Planning in Toronto,” International
Journal of Urban and Regional Research 23, no. 3 (1999): 421-44.
34. Calthorpe’s scathing critique of modernism as a failed ideology centered on “segregation,

specialization, centralization, and an undying dedication to technology” is well articulated in the
introduction of The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community and the American Dream
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 11. See also P. Calthorpe and W. Fulton, The
Regional City: Planning for the End of Sprawl (Washington: Island Press, 2001), 8-9; and S. Van der
Ryn and P. Calthorpe, eds. Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs
and Towns (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1986), 43-45.
35. For instance, see Krier’s ridicule of modernism and modernist zoning in: L. Krier, “Traditional
Ideas for Today’s Towns,” City Magazine 10, no. 2 (1988): 20-23; L. Krier, “Critique of Zoning,” in
Leon Krier: Houses Places, and Cities, ed. D. Porphyrios (London: AD Editions, 1984), 32-35; and L.
Krier, “Tradition-Modernity-Modernism: Some Necessary Explanations,” Architectural Design 57
(1987): 38-43.
36. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk interpret the ills of mid-twentieth-century urban-
ism as a result of an “out with the old” ethos dedicated to technical efficiency, “a rational model that
could easily be understood through systems analysis and flow charts.” This is a near-perfect defini-
tion of modernism. See also A. Duany and E. Plater-Zyberk, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl
and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2001), 11.
37. Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, http://www.cnu.org/charter
(accessed February 20, 2009).
38. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, 22-123.
39. Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning.
40. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism. It is important to note, however, that New Urbanism is certainly
not the only contemporary planning doctrine that can be qualified as postmodern. In fact, Ellin lists as
one several manifestations of postmodernism in urban design. These manifestations include: neoclassi-
cism, contextualism and vernacular design, historic preservation, master-planned and gated communi-
ties, and edge cities. The list could be expanded to include smart growth and regionalism. Furthermore,
in terms of the planning process, a number of paradigms, such as advocacy planning, disjointed incre-
mentalism, and communicative planning, carry postmodern elements (see S. Hirt, “Post-modernism
and Planning Models,” Critical Planning 9:116-27). In the broadest sense, the decline of expert-driven
planning and the increase in public participation represents planning’s response to the postmodern
embrace of plurality of views (see Filion, “Rupture or Continuity;” see also S. Gibson and K. Watson,
eds. Postmodern Cities and Spaces [Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 1995], 295).
41. Several of the most prominent New Urbanists have said that they are not postmodernists.
Peter Calthorpe distances himself from postmodernism in the opening pages of The Next American
Metropolis. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi state that: “We are not postmodernists, we never
were.” See “Learning from Denise Brown and Bob Venturi,” Metropolis, September 29, 2001, http://
architecture.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ&sdn=architecture&cdn=homegarden&tm=2
8&f=00&su=p284.9.336.ip_p504.1.336.ip_&tt=11&bt=1&bts=1&zu=http%3A//www.metropolismag
.com/html/vsba/index.html (accessed September 19, 2008). I respect the New Urbanists’ right to self-
identify in the language of their choice, but I take their claim with a grain of salt because I think they
operate with a narrower definition of postmodernism than the one used here. Calthorpe, for example,
speaks of postmodernism as “the architectural equivalent of a marketing gimmick”—a definition that
reduces postmodernism to an architectural movement. I am also reminded that Sigmund Freud self-
defined himself as “not a Freudist” (cited by F. Fromm-Reichmann, “Psychoanalytic and General
Dynamic Conceptions of Theory and Therapy—Differences and Similarities,” Journal of the
American Psychoanalytic Association 2 [1954]: 711-21).
42. Beauregard, “New Urbanism;” also, T. Dutton, “Cities, Cultures, and Resistance: Beyond Leon
Krier and the Postmodern Condition,” Journal of Architectural Education 42, no. 2: 3-9.
43. There are many examples for this certainty. My favorite is in Krier’s “Traditional ideas.” He
ends with: “Here you are. There’s the rough outline for building towns in cities. Now it’s up to you to
fill the gaps.”
44. Krier, “Traditional Towns” and L. Krier “The Reconstruction of the City,” Rational Architecture
(1987): 38-42, cited by Dutton, “Cities, Cultures, and Resistance.”
45. A. Duany and E. Talen, “Transect Planning,” Journal of the American Planning Association
68, no. 3 (2002): 245-67; A. Duany and E. Talen, “Making the Good Easy: The Smart-Code
Alternative,” The Fordham Law Journal (April 2002): 1445-68; and P. Katz, “Form First: The New
Urbanist Alternative to Conventional Zoning,” http://www.nh.gov/oep/resourcelibrary/f/formbased-
zoning/ formfirst.htm (accessed September 10, 2007).
46. See S. Hirt, “The Devil is in the Definitions: Contrasting American and German Approaches
to Zoning,” Journal of the American Planning Association 73, no. 4 (2007): 436-50.
47. Urban Design Associates, Celebration Pattern Book http://www.urbandesignassociates.com/
celeb_pb_introduction.asp, and http://www.urbandesignassociates.compattern_Detail.asp?Sort=1&Pr
ojectMainID=35&T=0&M=0&P=1&A=0&Section=3 (accessed February 24, 2009).
48. P. Pinnell, “Organon,” in Towns and Town-making Principles, ed. A. Duany and E. Plater-
Zyberk (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 105-10.
49. W. Lennertz, “The Codes,” in Towns and Town-making Principles, 96-104.
50. For example, Dutton, “Cities, Cultures, and Resistance.”
51. For example, Beauregard, “New Urbanism.”
52. E. Chapman, “City Planning under Industrialization: The Case of Cleveland,” Journal of the
Society of Architectural Historians 12, no. 2 (1953): 19-24.
53. E. Johannesen, “Making and Sustaining a Legacy: Cleveland’s Group Plan,” Inland Architect
(November-December, 1987): 30-35. For a history of the Group Plan, please also see K. Kolson, Big
Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001),
49-64; and W. Leedy, “Cleveland’s Struggle for Self-Identity,” in Modern Architecture in America, ed.
R. Wilson and S. Robison (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1991).
54. Cleveland City Planning Commission, Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Hough and Neighborhood
Fact Sheet: Fairfax (unpublished documents made available to the author by Cleveland’s City
Planning Department, undated).
55. W. Rose, Cleveland: The Making of a City (Kent, OH: Kent University Press, 1990).
56. Hough Revitalization Strategy (Kent, OH: Kent State University), unpublished document
made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department, 1986.
57. UDA Architects, The Fairfax Pattern Book, unpublished document made available to the
author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department, 1995.
58. There are many books on the history of builder’s manuals and architectural catalogues in
America (e.g., D. Reiff, Houses from Books: Treatises, Patterns Books, and Catalogues in American
Architecture [University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000]). However, I am not aware of any
study of “mail-order” homes in either Hough or Fairfax.
59. UDA Architects, The Fairfax Pattern Book, and City of Cleveland, Residential Design
Guidelines.
60. The complicated social causes of central-city decay in Cleveland are well beyond the scope of
this article. I do mean to imply that the architectural characteristics of Cleveland’s historic neighbor-
hoods, as described in the previous section, are in any way a leading cause. Similarly, I do not mean
to imply that the mid-twentieth-century efforts to revitalize the area failed only because modernist
architecture did not rise to the challenge.
61. Cleveland City Planning Commission, Neighborhood Fact Sheet: Hough and Neighborhood
Fact Sheet: Fairfax.
62. Cleveland’s planning director at the time in fact argued that the city must approach suburban
densities. See J. Howard, “An Urban Revitalization Program for Cleveland,” Journal of the American
Institute of Planners 10, no. 1 (1944): 18-23.
63. Cleveland City Planning Commission, The General Plan of Cleveland (1950). See also S. Hirt,
“Toward Postmodern Urbanism: Evolution of Planning in Cleveland, Ohio” Journal of Planning
Education and Research 25, no. 1 (2005): 27-42.
64. These include Downtown Cleveland 1975 (Cleveland City Planning Commission, 1959), as
well as the famous Erieview Downtown Renewal plans prepared by I.M. Pei & Associates (An Urban
Renewal Plan for Cleveland, 1961, and The General Neighborhood Renewal Plan, 1960).
65. N. Krumholz and W. Keating, A Century of Planning in Cleveland (Cleveland: Maxim
Goodman Levin College of Urban Affairs, Cleveland State University, 2002); Also, D. Keating,
N. Krumholz, and A. Wieland “Planning History Exhibition: A Century of Planning in Cleveland,”
Journal of Planning History 1, no. 1 (2002): 79-93.
66. For a detailed account of the impact of Urban Renewal on Cleveland’s neighborhoods, includ-
ing Hough and Fairfax, see W. Jenkins, “Before Downtown: Cleveland, Ohio, and Urban Renewal,
1949-1958,” Journal of Urban History 27, no. 4 (2001): 471-96; and W. Keating and N. Krumholz,
eds., Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods: Achievements, Opportunities, and Limits (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 1999).
67. For example, Welfare Federation of Cleveland, A Planning Proposal for the Hough Community
(1959). This proposal analyzed the problems of Hough by applying various sociological theories and
envisioned many social services, such as “family treatment units” and “specialized group services for
children and youth.”
68. For example, Cleveland City Planning Commission, The Fairfax Neighborhood Improvement
Program (1970).
69. See Keating and Krumholz, Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods.
70. Hough Revitalization Strategy, Kent State University.
71. For example, Sasaki and Associates, Development Strategy for the Doan Center Redevelopment
Area (1984).
72. Cleveland City Planning Commission, Connecting Cleveland: 2020 Citywide Plan, http://
planning.city.cleveland.oh.us/cwp/cpc.html (accessed March 6, 2009); also S. Hirt, “Toward
Postmodern Urbanism.”
73. Church Square was designed by UDA Architects, a major New Urbanist firm in Pittsburg.
However, it is a rather generic looking strip-mall amidst a sea of parking, so I do not consider as a
New Urbanist project.
74. UDA Architects, East 77th-East 89th Streets Euclid-Chester Concept Plan (1991), unpub-
lished document made available to the author by Cleveland’s City Planning Department.
75. Church Square, which required substantial federal investment, received national attention
when President Bill Clinton and a number of other high federal officials used it as a first stop on a
multistate trip to promote their plans for “reinventing the government.” See http://ech.cwru.edu/ech-
cgi/article.pl?id=CSSC (accessed March 4, 2009).
76. There is another New Urbanist project nearby, in the even more distressed Central neighbor-
hood. This project, the Central Commons, is a bit smaller (eighty units) and was, in fact, designed by
Duany and Zyberk.
77. The development has been a stunning commercial success. According to the interviews, in
1993 the townhouses started selling at $120,000 and the single-family homes at $150,000. This is ten
times the price of the average home in the vicinity. Regardless of the high prices, the units were sold
in record short time and the project has no vacancies. In 1995-1996, the median household income
in Beacon’s Place was about $55,000—about five times higher the median household income in the
surrounding areas. Present prices are between $200,000 and $400,000.
78. For the many projects of City Architecture, see www.cityarch.com (accessed March 3, 2009).
79. Mr. P. Volpe’s biography is very impressive. Aside from being a member of the Congress of New
Urbanism, he is also a member of the National Trust of Historic Preservation, the Cleveland
Restoration Society and the Downtown Cleveland Partnerships. He served as Commissioner of
Architecture for the City of Cleveland under Mayor G. Voinovich. See http://www.architectureofcleve-
land.com/html/volpe.htm (accessed February 2, 2009).
80. These include: the Urban Housing Award of the Smart Growth Community Excellence Awards,
the Neighborhood Revitalization Finalist recognition of the Northern Ohio Live Awards of Achievement,
and the Best Exterior Architectural Design on behalf of the Home Builders Association of Cleveland.
See www.cityarch.com (accessed March 3, 2009).
81. Lot sizes are 3,600-5,400 square feet per single-family home and 500-1,500 square feet per
townhouse.
82. Regretfully, staff at City Architecture was not able to find these design guidelines, which were
created over fifteen years ago. Thus, I cannot provide quotes from them.
83. Dorsky Hodgson Partners has offices in Cleveland, Fort Lauderdale, and Washington, D.C. To
the firm’s credits, they have a number of very reputable projects around the country. Their Winter
Park Village, a design that converted a vacant mall into a truly mixed-use street, for example, received
excellent marks not only by the Congress for the New Urbanism, but also by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency (see Malls into Main Streets: An In-depth Guide to Transforming Dead Malls into
Communities, 2005, http://www.cnu.org/node/388 [accessed March 6, 2009]).
84. Legacy Village has received the Innovative Design Award from the International Council of
Shopping Centers (ICSC) and the Professional Design Award of Merit from the Society of American
Registered Architects, New York Council.
85. See http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx (accessed March 6, 2009).
86. See Cleveland, Ohio: Invigorating Mixed-use Projects (2002),
http://retailtrafficmag.com/mag/retail_dorsky_hodgson_partners_2 (accessed March 11, 2009).
87. See http://casestudies.uli.org/Profile.aspx?j=7668&p=1&c=9 (accessed March 11, 2009).
Legacy Village has received some very negative press in Cleveland, however. For example, S. Litt,
“New Center Can’t Live Up to Promise of Its Name,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 16, 2003.
88. See http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx (accessed March 6, 2009).
89. As a matter of fact, all interviewed planners, architects, and developers who participated in
creating Crocker Park sought to distinguish it as a true mixed-use environment from the “fake”
Legacy Village.
90. There are both condominiums and apartments in Crocker Park. Rents vary between about
$850 and $2,200. Units for sale are priced between $300,000 and $800,000; see http://www.thecoral-
company.com/westhampton-pricing.html (accessed March 8, 2009).
91. See http://www.bialosky.com/index.cfm/Services/Planning (accessed March 8, 2009).
92. See http://www.bialosky.com/index.cfm/portfolio/MixedUse/Crocker_Park; (accessed March
8, 2009).
93. The latter quote comes from a published excerpt of an interview. See http://retailtrafficmag.
com/development/construction/retail_mixing (accessed March 8, 2009).
94. The design guidelines include all sorts of other typologies, including a color palette. See Final
Mixed-use Design Manual and Design Guidelines: Housing at http://www.cityofwestlake.org/depart-
ments/planning.php (accessed March 8, 2009).
95. This opinion seems to me strangely reminiscent of the 1949 General Plan of Cleveland,
which defined planning as an activity that “separates the different uses of land”—a citation that I
mentioned earlier.
96. However, an interviewed member of the development team believed that there are eight to
twelve people who both lived and worked in Crocker Park. They are, however, not employed in the
ground-floor retail stores, but in the free-standing office buildings. Interviewees expressed hope that
more people will be able to live by their places of work in the near future, since Crocker Park is cur-
rently adding more office space.
97. Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism.
98. R. Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (New York: Basic Books,
1987).
99. This is of course not to say that large-scale, unitary developments were not built in cities like
Cleveland. The Union Terminal and Shaker Square, by the Van Sweringen brothers, are obvious
examples. But during the interviews, I heard fewer references to such “mega-developments” dating
from the 1920s or later; instead, the traditional, small-scale main street and the old neighborhood
appeared to be almost everybody’s favorite model of good urban form.
100. J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961),
223-38.
101. See how Jacobs criticizes the New Urbanists in B. Steigerwald, “City Views: Urban Studies
Legend Jane Jacobs on Gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her Legacy,” in The Reason Magazine,
2001, http://www.reason.com/news/show/28053.html (accessed February 26, 2009).
102. I use again R. Fishman’s term from Bourgeois Utopias.
103. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition.
104. D. Harvey makes a similar argument regarding Baltimore in The Condition of
Postmodernity.
105. The work of another key postmodern author, J. Baudrillard’s, on “simulation” as part of
postmodernity has obvious relevance here (Simulation and Simulacra, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1994).
106. Jencks, What is Post-modernism?
107. The architectural firms had no control on, say, whether to make Legacy Village more acces-
sible to local residents or not, or whether to design it with fake or real residential floors. The firms
were given a task and had to comply with it (the only choice they had is to decline the assignment
altogether). It is hard to criticize the developers too, who by all accounts are committed to high-
quality built products and have solid reputations in the region. My point is not to criticize anyone
involved in these projects personally. None of my interviewees has the negative qualities that are
often blamed on “stars” like Krier or Duany. The point is simply to highlight the complexity of New
Urbanism as an urban planning method.
108. S. Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities: Urban Planning and the Contradictions
of Sustainable Development,” Journal of the American Planning Association 62, no. 3 (1996):
296-312.
Sonia A. Hirt is an Assistant Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Virginia Tech,
Blacksburg. She holds a doctoral degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her
interests include: East European urbanism, land-use planning and regulation, and plan-
ning theory and history. She is the author of Twenty Years of Transition: The Evolution of
Urban Planning in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, 1989-2009 (forthcoming,
United Nations Human Settlements Programme; with Kiril Stanilov)

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The online version of this article can be found at:

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>> Version of Record - Aug 18, 2009

This study explores New Urbanism as part of a contemporary cultural paradigm

Keywords: New Urbanism; modernism; postmodernism; Cleveland

JOURNAL OF PLANNING HISTORY, Vol. 8, No. 3, August 2009 248-273

denouncing the design tenets of New Urbanism’s predecessor, modernism,

It is unlikely that this question, which Charles Jencks posed over

New Urbanism as (Part of) Planning’s Postmodernity

David Harvey contends that modernism in planning took the form of

The strict, extraordinarily detailed design guidelines displayed in pat-

Premodern and Modern Urbanism in Cleveland

Founded in 1796 by surveyors from Connecticut, Cleveland was laid out

Housing deterioration began to take hold in Hough and Fairfax as early

Figure 4: An older residential street in Fairfax.

result of no planning” and defined planning as an activity that “separates

and envisioned “modern,” consolidated shopping centers with ample

Postmodern Urbanism: Beacon Place

Figure 6: Beacon Place’s townhouses.

Figure 7: Beacon Place’s single-family homes.

If Beacon Place at least strives to integrate into the local architectural

that city). Lyndhurst is a small historic community and now an inner-ring

Crocker Park is the largest mixed-use New Urbanist development in

and to serve as a major boost to Westlake’s tax base by drawing on a

Figure 9: Main Street at Legacy Village. http://www.dorskyhodgson.com/portfolio.aspx

Crocker Park adheres closely to the New Urbanist tenets. It is a high-

Discussion and Conclusions

The three developments reviewed above have received much publicity

common features, from the narrow streets to the explicit references to

developments are precisely what the term “developments” implies:

This dilemma of how to produce pluralism was well predicted by Jane

The postmodern vision of urban compactness, mixture and pedestrian-

words, changing the paradigm requires a conscious choice—but a choice

34. Calthorpe’s scathing critique of modernism as a failed ideology centered on “segregation,

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