Reading about people who do not find new urbanism functional is always validating. Waynesville didn’t do anything that hadn’t been done before in leaving business interests out of the land-use planning process. More likely, business people left themselves out of the visioning exercises because they were trying to turn a profit and didn’t think they had time to socialize.
Auto-centric businessman Joe Taylor was paraphrased in the Smoky Mountain Times as saying:
Advocates of new urbanism want to remake society by forcing commercial developments into a mold that doesn’t work on the ground.
Countering tenuously,
Public Works Director Fred Baker has long had the 13 principles of new urbanism tacked up on the wall of his office. He said they work in unison, and if you ignore more than two or three, the whole vision collapses.
