ancient cities

944 Urban Village
of Italian American immigrants in the West End
of Boston in 1957 and 1958. This anthropological
and sociological work challenged the assumptions
of planners about the nature or life within areas
designated as slums. Gans defined the area as an
urban village, as he found new groups of residents
trying to adapt their “village like” institutions and
cultures to the distinctly urban milieu.
Adopting a more idealistic position, A. Magnaghi
adopted the term in the translation of his
“Il progetto locale,” which discusses the importance
of very localized forms of governance in the
delivery of more sustainable forms of urban
development.
However, the term urban village was promoted
most vigorously in the United Kingdom by the
Urban Villages Group in the late 1980s and 1990s.
This group used it to describe development that
was guided by a set of principles that called for
well-designed, mixed use, and sustainable urban
areas that created a sense of place and community
commitment. The concept was derived not only
from the legitimacy established by the Urban
Villages Group (later renamed the Urban Villages
Forum) but also from its initial endorsement by the
U.K. government in national planning policy guidance
for the planning and design of housing.
Subsequently, however, it was superseded in government
discourse by different concepts, notably
with regard to urban renaissance and millennium
villages.
The context was one of increasing concern with
the quality of modern urban development, especially
when compared with older, more traditional
areas. In addition, the property recession of the
late 1980s and early 1990s also meant that development
professionals were willing to reconsider
their approaches. The promotion of the concept
was achieved by a small group of developers,
investors, architects, and planners brought together
by the Prince of Wales to form the Urban Villages
Group, a nonprofit advocacy group. In 1992 the
group’s manifesto was published, in the form of a
book, titled Urban Villages: A Concept for Creating
Mixed-Use Urban Developments on a Sustainable
Scale. The Prince, driven by his widely publicized
thinking on architecture, human values, and community,
led the call for a return to more human
scale and aesthetic development based on an analysis
of how “good” places were designed.
In addition, legitimacy for the concept was
derived through adoption of a variety of discourses
that resonated with both old and new planning
and design orthodoxies. Ideas such as proximity
and locality, which were central to the urban village,
reflected neighborhood planning ideals originating
in the 1920s. Promoters emphasized the
village-like characteristics found in certain parts of
some cities which have been discussed for decades
in urban geography and sociology. Particularly
important to any proponents of the urban village
has been the work of Jane Jacobs with her concerns
for diversity and mixing uses. The concept
drew attention to the need for community involvement
so that communities are given a stake in their
neighborhoods. This thinking was already popular
in the fields of community architecture and urban
design, and promoters of the urban village also
therefore found a receptive audience for this aspect
of their approach. A commitment to urban design
also dovetailed with the U.K. government’s contemporary
agenda, which was being explored
through its Quality in Town and Country Initiative
and subsequent Urban Design Campaign. These
were related initiatives to promote greater awareness
of urban design and both interdisciplinary
working and public and private sector partnerships
in the development of significant sites within
established urban areas. The work drew on the
experiences of a number of specific case studies
that were promoted in the United Kingdom.
Similar development concepts were also being
endorsed at the time in the United States; for
example, transit-oriented development, pedestrian
pockets, new urbanism, and traditional neighborhood
development, and the international nature of
the thinking, struck a cord within U.K. urban
policy, planning, and development circles. Finally,
during the late 1980s and early 1990s there
emerged an increased interest in sustainable forms
of development; the urban village concept drew on
this, albeit within a relatively narrow definition. In
the early 1990s, work to identify key principles
and to refine the urban village development concept
was on the model of new building schemes
such as urban extensions on green field sites.
Publications indicated that major new residential
developments within the United Kingdom should
take the form of urban villages with 3,000 to
5,000 people, a focal village square, everything