Celebration, Florida

Today's EDA lecture took a look at the trend of New Urbanism and how some planners and designers are worked to use physical design to shape community. Much of this is a response to urban sprawl which has been captured well by the National Geographic's New Suburb page. At the heart of it is an network of designers and planners that call themselves the Congress for New Urbanism.

One of the examples in class was Celebration, Florida which has two different official web pages: The city and the town center. During class we saw some quotes from Michael Pollan's exploration of Celebration several years ago in the NYTimes Sunday Magazine. But almost no one anticipated the possibility of 50% of the homes being for sale.

But there is much more information out there. Before class officially began I showed some of the Slate Slide Show looking at Celebration and how it is settling in. And Travel and Leisure magazine has written about a slew of the New Urban communities sprinkled around Florida.

These communities raise a different question about how sustainable they really are. New LEED standards could help evaluate that.