and while I’m posting things I wrote at work today, a response to a question about “a certain kind of economy… conducive to the development of New Urbanism.”

Although there’s some literature out there on the impact of telecom on urbanism and economic development, not much of it has specifically discussed New Urbanism. Some of it has focused on urbanism more generally, though, and a theme that I’ve seen across the literature is that while the internet may make transferring data easier, in another sense it even further privileges face-to-face interaction. Thus, the theory goes that online retailing will ultimately hurt resellers of commodities, like big box retailers, rather than downtown merchants who can trade on the experience of personal contact; similarly, although commodity work like call centers can be easily outsourced, “creative” industries that rely heavily on personal interaction to generate ideas will continue to thrive within urban settings (cf. Florida).

New Urbanist development regulations largely arose alongside slow-growth, pro-environment political coalitions in many cities — particularly along the Pacific coast. Some authors have said that the increased mobility that the internet allows will lead telecommuters not to single houses atop hilltops, but to high-quality-of-life towns within reach of metropolitan amenities (cf. Nevarez), and that those towns will develop slow-growth (and often, although not necessarily, pro-New Urbanist) politics as a result.

Some books you may want to look for:
– William Mitchell, “E-topia” (MIT, 1999)
– Leonard Nevarez, “New Money, Nice Town” (Routledge, 2003)
– Richard Florida, “Cities and the Creative Class” (Routledge, 2004)
– Joel Kotkin, “The New Geography” (Random House, 2001)

Joel Kotkin has lately made a name for himself by disparaging Richard Florida, but some aspects of his book echo Florida’s argument: that engineering jobs thrive in manicured, suburban “nerdistans” while economies in urban areas are dominated by a “cultural-industrial complex.”