This week. I had a first-hand experience in something called New Urbanism.

As far as I can tell, NU is a movement designed to help us “get back to our community roots” through urban design. NU is expressed as an architectural philosophy that designs and builds neighborhoods with multiple types of living spaces (single family homes, apartments, senior living) that are close to shopping and work.

The driving force behind this movement is a belief that weak urban planning has contributed to a loss of community and a loss of neighborhood.

As we in the USA have built bigger houses, set them farther off the road away from our neighbors and added a garage (or two) we have drifted into isolated lifestyles with long commute times and very little interaction with our neighbors. Because of this, we have lost the sense of community we once had.

I can’t argue with the need to recapture community but walking and driving around these two neighborhoods, I couldn’t help wonder if architecture alone will do it? I don’t think so.

Here it was, a beautiful Saturday afternoon in early spring and instead of seeing a busy, vibrant neighborhood with people walking or sitting on their front porches watching the world go by, what I saw was row after row of empty front porches and nearly empty streets. And that’s when the light bulb went on. Solving the neighborhood isolation problem is not an architectural or design issue. It’s a human issue.

Until we decide that we want to interact with our neighbors, until we decide we want to care about the welfare of our community, until we decide to change our habits, the front porches and the sidewalks of these new NU communities (and all other communities) are going to stay empty. Or to put it another way — grumpy isolated people in new shiny communities are still going to be grumpy and isolated!

Fooey on NU. I say replace it with with the OFU (old fashioned urbanism) movement. OFU means saying ‘hi’ to your neighbor, sitting on your front steps or leaving the car at home and walking or riding your bicycle to the corner store. It means baking cookies or bread and sharing them for no other reason than you care. It means shopping locally and getting to know the store keepers and local business owners.

It means re-establishing our neighborhoods. Not throwing them out and building new ones.