The Newburgh Advocate

Trevor Boddy has an article from Friday’s Globe and Mail (Canadian) about a celebrity appearance of Andres Duany, spokesman for New Urbanism, to sell a couple of developments in British Columbia.

Newburgh residents might remember Duany from his visits to Newburgh for the charrettes on the Leyland waterfront development project, culminating in the final presentation which is now available on the City’s site in four parts (see here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.) These videos and the earlier charrettes with the actual citizen involvement had been available on Leyland’s site, but are no longer there.

Boddy is critical of New Urbanism in his article:

New Urbanism is dangerous because it claims to cure the very sprawl and social class separation that it causes. There are worse ways to develop the suburbs, but none are so two-faced. The New Urbanism is city planning’s equivalent of the “compact SUV.”

The movement, led by Mr. Duany and partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, is a compromise position that will be doomed by greater forces. Mr. Duany’s two Southlands proposals, nicknamed “Tuck” and “Sweep,” offer us a Honda Element and Land Rover LR2 when what Tsawwassen really needs is a Prius or Smart car.

The Canadian project is a little different from what is being proposed in Newburgh. The development here would be denser than “Tuck” and “Sweep” which work out to a net density of “barely four dwelling units per acre.”

But Boddy’s commentary is well taken: don’t be bewitched by the stage manager.

If the Century Group’s larger proposal is approved, the 2,000 housing units planned there will be worth between $1-billion and $2-billion, so a few hundred thousand spent on a lavish design charrette with pricey imported talent is chump change.

I wasn’t at the original charrettes, where citizens could offer up their suggestions for the project to be incorporated by Duany and his planners. I did attend the concluding panel (links to the video above) as well as the one year “anniversary” meeting held recently, sans Duany.

At both meetings I was struck by the slick salesmanship that reminded me of another salesman from Tuxedo Park, Clotaire Rapaille, a marketing guru profiled on the PBS documentary The Persuaders (In the clip Rapaille is holding forth at his Tuxedo mansion.) In an interview here he explains his work with codes:

Do you think that, ultimately, people can be figured out?

Part of my theory is that in the human world, nothing happens by chance, nothing. When you see people doing something, there is always a reason why, a code. I don’t pretend I know all the codes, but when I work with a client and we try to break the code, then we understand why people do that. Nothing happens by accident in the human world. It’s fascinating to try to understand, to break the code.

And the codes can be translated into practical marketing strategies.

Yes, and those can be, of course, translated into how to address the real needs of the consumer, which means marketing practice and marketing strategies. For example, if I know that in America the cheese is dead, which means is pasteurized, which means legally dead and scientifically dead, and we don’t want any cheese that is alive, then I have to put that up front. I have to say this cheese is safe, is pasteurized, is wrapped up in plastic. I know that plastic is a body bag. You can put it in the fridge. I know the fridge is the morgue; that’s where you put the dead bodies. And so once you know that, this is the way you market cheese in America.

I started working with a French company in America, and they were trying to sell French cheese to the Americans. And they didn’t understand, because in France the cheese is alive, which means that you can buy it young, mature or old, and that’s why you have to read the age of the cheese when you go to buy the cheese. So you smell, you touch, you poke. If you need cheese for today, you want to buy a mature cheese. If you want cheese for next week, you buy a young cheese. And when you buy young cheese for next week, you go home, [but] you never put the cheese in the refrigerator, because you don’t put your cat in the refrigerator. It’s the same; it’s alive. We are very afraid of getting sick with cheese. By the way, more French people die eating cheese than Americans die. But the priority is different; the logic of emotion is different. The French like the taste before safety. Americans want safety before the taste.

Is Duany–and Leyland–on code for Newburgh?

Certainly, the selling of the experience of Newburgh, from visiting the little markets and the flower baskets and walking-friendly neighborhoods sounds enchanting. Also enchanting to the fiscal-minded is the additional tax revenue the new development would ostensibly bring with it.

What has been missing from the salesmanship is how this new development will integrate with some of the tough realities the city faces. It’s not the developer’s duty, of course, to address governmental issues from crime to burdensome taxes to the economic woes of a post-industrial city, but these beasts will need to be dealt with, even between the stalls of the cheese markets and beneath the begonias.