Beyond seaside: Knowledge,place and new urbanism

Abstract

New Urbanism continues to present a distinct challenge for research in Planning and Geography. At once utopian and pragmatic, it evinces an ability to reshape diverse environments by appealing to a relatively stable set of design principles. Theresa Brock Moneo's examination of Seaside shows that New Urbanist landscapes do not result from the application of design principles alone; they are embedded in political, ideological and cultural logics, including notions of tradition and fictional representation that shape our ideas about utopia and our sense of place. While New Urbanism may involve the application of universal design principles and ideas about tradition, in practice, the actualization of its utopian designs requires flexibility in managing different place-based contexts, including existing constituencies, institutions, built environments and cultural knowledge. Viewing phenomena like collective memory as objective knowledge rather than subjective experience could aid research into how New Urbanism engages participants in its utopian project within a variety of institutional environments.

As a former land use planner turned geographer, I read Brock Moneo's piece as offering an important and thoughtful perspective on the role of New Urbanism in producing specific kinds of places. In particular, the piece raises an important question about legibility – what caused so many people to identify the ‘uniquely unnatural and rather whimsical landscape’ (Brock Moneo, 2025: 7) of a brand new development with the traditional American small town? Brock Moneo argues for Seaside as an example of a small-town ‘nation form’ embedded in collective memory and tradition. Her most provocative claim posits a new constitutive role for fiction in producing a ‘utopian familiarity’ (Brock Moneo, 2025: 5) with Seaside in the collective memory of its residents, visitors and commentators. I think it is important to emphasize that the most striking empirical example she offers is a film, which leads me to wonder if there is something important about the role of fictional images as distinct from literary fiction. It seems to me that the utopian premise of New Urbanism, which Brock Moneo characterizes by asking ‘can tradition – the designs of the past – meet the challenges of the present and future?’ (Brock Moneo, 2025: 2), produces landscapes which are, to a great extent, conceived visually as images or renderings (Arefi and Triantafillou, 2005) and codified as ‘graphic rules’ in legal instruments like Form-Based Codes (Moroni and Lorini, 2017). The utopian premise that proper design enables social flourishing is activated in practice by design principles that privilege the visual.

Flexible utopianism

The claim that physical design produces social benefits is probably not entirely without merit. If Jane Jacobs shows in The Death and Life of Great American Cities the negative impacts of modernist, authoritarian planning, why can’t better planning and ‘good’ design ameliorate these same problems? Still, even Ebenezer Howard recognized that the benefits of good design could not be realized within an incompatible social structure (e.g., a system of private property), and while the New Urbanist charter makes vague gestures to solutions beyond physical design, the theory is primarily centered on promoting a prescribed set of design principles that it claims promote social benefits without speaking to social reforms per se. In practice, New Urbanism evinces a flexibility that allows its universal, utopian design prescriptions to move between varied geographies and social settings. I read Brock Moneo's argument against the backdrop of New Urbanism's broader aspirational vision and wonder whether (or how) her findings could be extended to cases beyond Seaside. Thinking about New Urbanism as a planning practice, is it possible to identify a mechanism mediating subjective beliefs and the construction of built environments?

Brock Moneo offers one approach to the problem, arguing that the neotraditional design principles New Urbanism claims to have derived from empirical study are divorced from their historical and political context and, in fact, increasingly constituted by fictional representation. This is a reasonable account in Seaside, given the town's association with a well-known film, but this is a very particular association that does not fully account for why the separation from social context was possible in Seaside in the first place. The question remains, for me, what are the methodological grounds supporting any generalization about the fictional constitution of a small-town imaginary beyond Seaside? Another approach to the problem might see New Urbanism as a flexible practice and ask how the core animating principles get negotiated through existing geographies and social relations, positioning us to formulate and assess general claims about New Urbanism that account for its empirical specificity and normative universality.

The relevant components in such a study will be quite specific, especially when projects are developed within existing legal codes, development patterns and political processes. When the City of Miami hired Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company for a comprehensive overhaul of its zoning laws, it looked to the principles of New Urbanism to govern an existing urban space subject to rules that had accumulated over nearly a century of master planning and zoning. This required a ‘translation from the old code to new code’ (Plater-Zyberk, 2007). The process in Miami included a diverse set of existing constituencies, and some neighborhood groups opposed the plan based on concerns about how it would impact the future use of their property (Rabin, 2009). And approval for Miami 21 was nearly derailed when a single commissioner, locked in a tight mayoral election against a critic of the plan, unexpectedly voted no (Rabin, 2009). Something as simple as the timing of an election had material implications for how New Urbanism went from utopian principles to codified plans to built environment.

These dissimilarities suggest the need for an approach that accounts for New Urbanism's pragmatic flexibility. The small-town ideal does not operate in Miami 21, which is organized around an urban vision evoking a future ‘where Miami will be spoken in the same breath as Paris, London, Buenos Aires and New York’ (Miami21: Your City, Your Plan, 2010). It is not clear the extent to which tradition is even relevant. After all, Miami is not a small town. Closer in spirit to Seaside, Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was designed around the ‘qualities of a classic American town’ (DPZ | CODESIGN, n.d.). It eschews much of Seaside's whimsy; looking at pictures of Kentlands, it is eerily difficult to remember that it is a planned community from 1988. Like Seaside, Kentlands was developed on a single large parcel of land, though the land was subject to the jurisdiction of an existing municipality, and the success of the project relied on the enthusiasm of the mayor. While the vision for Kentlands was grounded in neo-traditional design, the extent to which this vision relied on claims to a small-town imaginary or what role fiction has played in constituting its representation is less clear than in Seaside. Almost a tabula rasa, the landscape on which Seaside was built could support a purer version of New Urbanism divorced from any existing context. On the other hand, both Miami and Kentlands reveal the importance of institutional context in shaping how the utopian ideal gets spatially produced.

Objective and subjective knowledge

I think any approach to this problem needs to treat planning theories, political institutions, nation forms and works of fiction as bits of objective knowledge that cohere with subjective experience in specific spatial arrangements. This is a hurried and loose summary of something like Popper's (1992) theory of objective knowledge. Planners frequently deal with this kind of knowledge, such as subdivision plans or paper streets. These are products of human imagination that exist independently of how anyone experiences them subjectively. Crucially, they do not have to exist materially in the built physical environment. A paper street, which is platted and legally recorded on a subdivision map but never built, does not exist as an actual physical street but still exerts influence on the world – an influence that has been felt by any property owner or planner who has had to deal with one. Understood as objective knowledge rather than subjective memory, the ‘collective memory’ invoked by Seaside's developers and boosters need not rely on an individual's subjective experience of any actually existing time and place to motivate beliefs and produce a physical landscape. The utopian ideal and its version of tradition are sufficient if they motivate a subjective account of the world and get spatially fixed into the community through everyday practice.

This is essentially what Brock Moneo's account of Seaside shows, and it can be read through this analytical lens. The Truman Show is an objective knowledge-object that feeds back into subjective understandings of Seaside and retroactively shapes it as a material place through human thought and action. Seaside's association with a film strikes me as significant in that it provides a template that prefigures the landscape as a visually legible space for observers, not unlike the New Urbanist design paradigm itself. However, Brock Moneo's analysis of the role of fiction leads her to suggest a level of performativity on the part of the residents of Seaside; in my view, this risks overstating the fictitious nature of Seaside when we could instead accept Seaside as a materially real place that has been produced through the interactions of objective knowledge-products and subjective thought; this includes how the utopian vision is produced, institutionalized as knowledge (e.g., empirically valid design principles) and taught to planners as an objective theoretical archetype (Arefi and Triantafillou 2005). Ultimately, the question is: can we understand how New Urbanist theory spreads so widely and gets applied in such different contexts, while leaving room for the kind of rich empirical detail provided by Brock Moneo's analysis? Perhaps, but it requires a framework for identifying how operative elements interact within particular spatial arrangements that can then permit the testing of more general claims about such processes.

None of the preceding comments is meant to invalidate Brock Moneo's critique of Seaside per se. My thinking is motivated by an opportunity to expand this kind of critical engagement with New Urbanism to other cases. This requires clarity about how we move from descriptions about a particular place to the function of categories such as ‘small town’, ‘nation form’ or ‘fiction’ as broader phenomena. In Seaside, a work of art has clearly played an important role in making traditional design legible as such. In Seaside, a work of art has clearly made traditional design legible. In other places where the small-town ideal prevails, fiction's role may be diminished or absent. In New Urbanist projects prioritizing general design principles, different imaginaries may emerge. Legibility may not be a primary analytical concern when the New Urbanist ideal is woven into decades of accumulated laws, institutions and spatial arrangements. One approach is to search for a mechanism mediating between ideas, people and place, examining how the utopian tenets of New Urbanism are negotiated with existing geographies, institutional frameworks and locational context to produce built landscapes.

The empirical detail that makes Brock Moneo's study of Seaside compelling is precisely what makes it difficult to sustain generalizable claims; I am not sure that even the objective knowledge framework permits a full accounting of the multiplicity of subjective worlds and objective knowledge-objects which could be said to shape the planning process or provides a way of isolating any piece of the puzzle for analysis. This may mean that even particularist descriptions of a place – even one as extraordinary as Seaside – are similarly difficult to sustain. Still, it is worth considering ways to sort through the complexity in which New Urbanism operates and, given its emphasis on design, image and visual representation, the inclusion of cultural products like films in this set of knowledge is a valuable contribution.