That would be High Point.

The Rhino writes up New Urbanist planner Andres Duany’s visit, during he which he no doubt rubbed a few city planners wrong when he suggested they scrap regulations and building codes to help spark downtown development.

Turns out Duany isn’t your average New Urbanist, whatever you think a New Urbanist might be:

You might expect a New Urbanist to be a tree-hugging, green-space-advocating, downtown-building-code-proposing control freak when it comes to designing cities, but Duany turned out to be none of those things.

He attacked American environmentalism for worrying about minor species rather than humans in land planning. He attacked the American environmental movement – at least as has affected urban planning – for only having one tool in its toolbox: green space and more green space, most of it unusable.

He attacked most urban planners, city planning departments and the development codes they produce as “wildly romantic” because they think that, by mandating wide property setbacks and periodic trees, they can produce old-style downtowns.

He also attacked most downtown building codes as impediments to private development and especially to the development of old-school, or New Urban, downtowns, whichever you want to call them. He called for throwing out most of the rules generated by city planners.

But the money quote came after two days of wining and dining in High Point he concluded that “really high-quality humans live here – against all odds.”