Brave New Edens

"The sum of human happiness increases because of New Urbanism" Andres Duany America is a country that never runs out of promises. There is always a fresh start, a new frontier, a shiny next opportunity for which some people will pick up all their things and go for broke. New fresh starts in a world gone wrong are represented by Seaside Fl., the archetypal American town of The Truman Show movie, by Celebration Fl., Walt Disney Company’s town, by Columbia Md., the imaginary city constructed by James Rouse and accurately described by the Pulitzer-winning novelist Michael Chabon. These cities are all examples of New Urbanism, a movement of town planning born after World War II, because of the disgust for the post urban sprawl. This movement declared war on auto- driven development and vowed to reintroduce suburban Americans to the civic virtues of active community involvement. The principles of New Urbanism, also termed “neo traditional” planning, were defined by a Charter between 1993 and 1996. The aim of this paper is to show how these corporations, selling “dream homes” in the “best place to live”, update the promises made by the English trading companies that were chartered by the King to receive authority and land to establish a colony in the New World and, at the same time, reintroduce the idea of the “heaven on earth” community that the Puritan settlers wanted to establish. The paper will start from the linguistic analysis of the preamble of the “Charter for New Urbanism”. In this text, the architectonic language is linked with “community building” strategies, confirming that in the American culture the architectural project has been a metaphor of the socio-political one since the publication of the famous “Letters from an America Farmer” (London, 1782). Through a comparative analysis of the fundamental documents of the above mentioned cities, of their web sites and of some typical architectural components, I will demonstrate that images and words used by the corporations aim to sell a place in “Paradise” and that this Paradise is the metaphor of the archetypal American community: the biblical “city upon a hill” that constitutes the Puritan vision for the New World, the “promised land”.