I don’t know when the first Yellow Pages was published, but it was a milestone in local commerce. Want to hire a plumber, find a pizzaria, get a new muffler, purchase some building supplies, or locate an orthodontist? We all let our fingers do the walking. Before that, business was personal knowledge, and then along came the telephone. All of a sudden, everyone was wired — perhaps a more significant technological revolution than the Internet in its day — and somebody thought to categorize these numbers under business services. That made the Yellow Pages and similar directories possible. If you own a phone and are located within a specific area, you are included.
Until recently, the New Urbanism operated like a pretelephonic society. It grew into an industry sometime within the last fifteen years, with scores of specialists who are also urbanists. These urban designers, transportation and parking specialists, architects, builders, developers, financiers, nonprofit organizations, product manufacturers, and many other groups of people — were working locally, regionally, and nationally on hundreds of new urban projects valued from about $10 million dollars to $2 billion or more. While the big names were known to lots of people, most new urbanists labored in relative obscurity. The categorization of specialists and products necessary to a growing industry was dispersed in the heads of informed new urbanists across North America.
The demand for New Urbanism is growing geometrically. But who do you call to get something done? Now there’s a new tool to provide better information, more competition, and further expansion of this trend. It’s called the Directory of the New Urbanism, and it is a project two years in the making on the part of New Urban News Publications.
WEBS OF PARTICIPANTS
The Directory covers the US and Canada. Since the New Urbanism is a principle-based trend and not just an industry, we needed to systematically figure out who should be included. I noticed when researching new urban developments that they each formed their own webs of participants. Every project pulled in at least a few, and sometimes a score or more people and firms who had never contributed to New Urbanism before. In short, each development was a potential training ground for new urbanists — and probably the primary training ground, given the dearth of quality training in urbanism at most college architecture, planning, and development schools.
I thought an industry could be identified by cross-referencing those who contributed to new urban projects across the US and Canada. That’s what we did, and we supplemented that effort by adding listings in categories of people who don’t usually work on projects — but nevertheless make a significant contribution to the trend as a whole. Examples include certain university programs, nonprofit agencies, and internet resources.
It’s a pretty amazing book, and indicative of real growth in this trend. The Directory includes more than 150 categories of people and products. It’s bigger than the Yellow Pages in Ithaca/Tompkins County, the statistical metropolitan area where I live, for goodness’ sake.
It’s not perfect. People have been unintentionally left out and I apologize for that. The Canadian listings are light, and the products section can and should be expanded in coming years. But no resource has ever been put together like this — and personally, I’ve found myself reaching for it on a daily basis. My greatest responsibility is to provide exceedingly useful resources for those who are working in the New Urbanism day in and day out, and I believe The Directory of the New Urbanism will be valuable to those who are “in the trenches” or who desire to be there. That alone makes the Directory worth it, and we will work to make it better every year. See newurbannews.com for more information.
This article is available in the March 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue. |