American readers will be delighted with this: someone is trying to build a new America. – no Americans, that is. And, to be more specific, it is the European Union (EU), Putin’s New Russia and Capitalist China that are trying to do it. Everyone calls this trend the ‘New American Urbanism’.

The New American Urbanism is what urban planners, architects, civil engineers, developers, real estate agents, appraisers, and bankers throughout the United States refer to simply as ‘Urbanism.’ It is the way so familiar to all of us in which cities, towns and communities have been conceived, planned and built. There is nothing new in this, since urban planning in the United States and to a lesser extent in Canada is a phenomenon that dates back to the 1970s. It’s just the very practical way North American cities are structured: a mix of commercial, residential, and light industrial districts effectively connected by a system of boulevards, highways, streets, and alleys. Residential neighborhoods are made up of mixed-use housing clustered with schools, sports centers, wide sidewalks, and essentially everything close to home.

Businesses are conducted in downtown areas or city centers, with the characteristic profile typical of high-rise and low-rise concrete buildings. One would not think that all this would cause such a stir. But it has. There are three specific reasons why the rest of the world is suddenly rediscovering the United States and putting it (again) under the microscope: time, money, and economy of scale. The EU, Russia and China face the common dilemma of having to relocate millions upon millions of people in a relatively short time and share the common denominator of minimizing social cost and maximizing affordability.

With European borders collapsing and unique national identities rapidly disappearing, the urban trend across Europe today is to create hubs where jobs are relocated and redeveloped. Cities and towns must follow the people who, in turn, seek economic prosperity wherever they find it. As such, it is imperative that a live, social thread be created quickly and quickly anywhere it is needed. Call it the logistics of capitalism, but the EU cannot achieve its coveted goal of creating a free market area of ​​600 million people, twice the size of North America, if this area cannot be properly connected, effectively served and economically integrated.

Similarly, it has been more than a decade since Russia is in the process of doing away with the old Stalinist organization of a self-sufficient modern European Russia, on the one hand surrounded by a group of backward Asian republics and Putin, the former head of the The KGB has now become, for internal political reasons, the main architect of the new Russian social integration. Consequently, the republic is now in the process of developing far-flung areas like Northern Siberia and the Eastern Urals, and will soon face the enormous problem of having to accommodate, house, connect and integrate millions upon millions of domestic workers and migrants. .

China suffers from an ailment called ‘one-sided development’: Its coastal areas, home to thirty-five percent of China’s 1.3 billion people, are expanding at a rate of 10 percent a year and have been for the past decade. , while the remaining sixty-five percent of the population living inland are housed in communities where running water is considered the ultimate luxury. The Chinese leadership is well aware of the economic gap that exists between the inhabitants of the rich, modern and Westernized cities on the one hand and the poor, uneducated and hopeless inhabitants of the countryside, as well as the tension, envy and great malaise social that this situation generates. – if not resolved quickly – will inevitably lead to.

Therefore, America. Using standardized models of development, it has occurred to urban planners around the world (possibly at the same time) that it takes Americans four years to completely build, connect, develop, service, and integrate from scratch a standardized community for 30,000 people. This would include the construction of highways, viaducts, railways, shopping malls, housing, parks, sidewalks, streets, lighting, school and sports facilities, utility installations such as electricity, telephone lines, cables, sewers, water pipes, as well as a small airport. like planting trees everywhere. In addition, the typical construction time of a house in the United States, counted from when a hole is drilled in the ground until the keys are delivered to the owner, is five and a half months. Using the same standardized models but applied to different construction and development methods, it would take Western Europeans seven years to achieve the same goal, with an average house construction time of about a year. It would take the Russians almost ten years to do the same, with a typical house building time of one year and the data is not available for the Chinese, but it is commonly believed that it would take them longer than the Russians to build this model city. in the countryside.

Furthermore, what foreigners find especially expensive about American cities, towns, and neighborhoods is the economy of scale: the more you build, the less expensive it becomes. And of course the fact that environmental concerns are paramount, particularly in Canada. So much so, that Europeans have come together in Stockholm, no less, to draft, well… The Stockholm Charter, in fact, where the European Town Planning Council has officially adopted as its mission the goal of maintaining and preserving well-being and the integration of present and future generations by rapidly building mixed-use cities, towns, and villages with architectural lines, construction techniques, planning, and management modeled on American cities.

It seems that someone is eating a lot of criticism these days…

Louis Frascati