New Urban News I: The Elusive Small-House Utopia

© 2010 New York Times

“Builders have tried quality rather than size, but they always fail,” says Witold Rybczynski, an architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “The market always says: We don’t care. If you’re giving us a smaller house, we don’t want it.”

from "The Elusive Small-House Utopia" in the New York Times magazine

RYBCZYNSKI is right, or course. We've been through an age of materialism in which we thought more and bigger was better (vide Donald Trump). But many New Urban developments, starting with Seaside, have been about quality instead of quantity. Quality of design, materials and construction, and quality of life in a community instead of in the isolation of sprawl.

And now we have peak oil, climate change and epidemics of obesity and diabetes. The future will not be like the recent past - that was just a recent aberration.