New Urbanist Silverback Andres Duany and the Young Locusts

Iz in ur city uzing ur urbanizm. (Photo: St0rmz via
Flickr)

If you’ve been roaming the urbanist blogosphere
this week, you may have happened upon the comments made by one of the
progenitors of New Urbanism, Andres Duany, in an interview with the Atlantic.
Duany, apparently, has a problem with young people coming into a city
and using it in a way that he disapproves of:

There’s this generation who grew up in the suburbs, for whom the
suburbs have no magic. The mall has no magic. They’re the ones that have
discovered the city. Problem is, they’re also destroying the city. The
teenagers and young people in Miami come in from the suburbs to the few
town centers we have, and they come in like locusts. They make traffic
congestion all night; they come in and take up the parking. They ruin
the retail and they ruin the restaurants, because they have different
habits than older folks. I have seen it. They’re basically eating up the
first-rate urbanism. They have this techno music, and the food
cheapens, and they run in packs, great social packs, and they take over a
place and ruin it and go somewhere else. 

It’s a perplexing statement at best, and it would be interesting to
hear Duany questioned more closely on this point. It certainly plays
into the argument that his carefully planned brand of urbanism bears but
faint resemblance to the organic creation of a real, chaotic city such
as Rome or New York.

Yesterday on Greater
Greater Washington, contributor Dan Reed, a native of the D.C. area,
posted a response to Duany’s comments:

Dear Mr. Duany,

At 22 years old, I qualify as a Millennial. I enjoy loud music
and cheap, greasy food, among other things. I also love cities,
including Washington, D.C., the one I was born in. I can’t afford to
live there, so I live at home with my parents. Yet, according to what
you recently told
the Atlantic, I’m ruining the place…

But you know what really kills a city? Keeping people out. Making
it prohibitively expensive by demanding it look or feel a certain way. A
city cannot be planned all at once or dropped from the sky. A city is
the accumulation of years and years of small changes made by many, many
people of all kinds, creating a unique, irreplaceable product.

Searching for more intelligent commentary on Duany and his Atlantic
interview? Head over to Strassgefühl
and mammoth.

More from around the network: Another young lover of cities, Rob
Pitingolo at Extraordinary
Observations, writes that urbanism and environmentalism are not the
same thing. Car
Free Days posts on Bike to School month. And Reimagine
an Urban Paradise celebrates nine car-free years, in Chicago, D.C.
and Pittsburgh.