New Urbanism is perceived as liberal, by both the Left and the Right, which puzzles William S. Lind, a paleoconservative:
Conservatives are supposed to love sprawl, but many of us actually like the idea of living in traditional neighborhoods, villages, and towns — cities perhaps a little less. We have nothing against walking and want nice places to do it. As conservatives, we believe traditions should be upheld, in architecture as elsewhere. And conservatism has always favored local variety over broad-scale uniformity.
Edmund Burke told us more than 200 years ago that traditional societies are organic wholes. If you disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well.
Oh, this is easy. Conservatives want to forbid you from doing what is wrong. Leftists want to force you to do what is right.
The tools of the New Urbanism are collective and are applied coercively, both of which are the hallmarks of the modern left.
The right would love to have better cities. But for the left, telling you what to do is what makes the cities better.
So naturally there’s conflict.
Conservatives supported sprawl because it allowed people to escape black and Latino crime that progressives unleashed in the 60s. The only way to escape the continuing march of scum was to keep moving.
It’s hard to see New Urbanism as a political opinion. Recreating pre-automobile community structures is both sustainable and organic to the way our country developed for centuries. Only in the past 100 years has the structure changed with the influence of technology.