The Ideal of Community and its Counterfeit Construction

Under the banner of New Urbanism, the marketing of community is inherently exclusionary. These developments, produced with mandated aesthetics, proffer a vernacular image of community for the social relations and personal identification of place. This commodification is socially corrosive. Design guidelines, costs, contracts, legal prohibitions, marketing, and surveillance all establish the exclusive criteria of residency, but cannot substitute for social interaction and self-definition. Community is an arena of participation that evolves through discourse, a constituent missing within the philosophy and constructed developments of New Urbanism.