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If there is an Al Gore of new urbanism, it is Prince Charles. Working with Léon Krier (who is often portrayed as Merlin to the Prince's Arthur), he began in 1988 to put his theories into practice in the planning of Poundbury. In its layout of streets, its basic housing forms, its integration of uses, Poundbury would hark back to the British and European towns of an earlier, pre-automobile era. Accused of royal hubris and of yearning for a lost past, Charles pursued his vision, as he put it, "in the face of a chorus of abuse and ridicule." Poundbury now has a thousand homes, two factories, a market square, cafés, pubs, and a population of 2,500. In the next stage of its development it will double in size.
From the train station in Dorchester, I was told, Poundbury was about a 25-minute walk. The bus would take 15. Since the sun had come out for the first time in days, I decided to walk, despite the brisk winds riding in on the coattails of the storm.
The walk took me through the lively center of Dorchester, by an outdoor farm market, past the Roman quarter and the cathedral, along the High Street, and finally to the town's edge, where the road led uphill toward open land. There stood Poundbury.
It looked...well, it looked like a newly built eighteenth(or maybe nineteenth?)-century English village of mostly two- and three-story buildings that had the simulated reality of an architect's rendering. The first person I encountered to ask directions to the Poundbury town management office told me, "Go straight ahead and take the first street on your left. It's there, in a really old building. I mean a real really old building."
That left turn took me with surprising suddenness into the village world. I found myself disoriented at first. Footpaths diverged in every direction. The narrow streets, mostly one car wide and lined with square, stately-looking brick and limestone homes, some with small front flower gardens or trellises overgrown with nasturtiums, seemed to have no discernible pattern. Neither were there the looping suburban ring roads that leave a pedestrian feeling hopeless. I had the sense that the streets had found their paths organically, extended as new homes were built, and only over time revealed their cartographic sense.
I found the town's architecture too formal and some of its finer touches forcibly quaint, like the brass plaques on the doorposts, for instance, engraved with the date of construction. While the winding streets and seemingly free association of uses engaged me as would, say, Rome's Trastevere, Barcelona's Gràcia, or New York's Greenwich Village -- all places made for walking, where people live, work, and shop, and where wrong turns can lead to amiable encounters -- Poundbury seemed, to my citified sensibility, devoid of funk, its streets all but deserted. I had the feeling of having been digitized into an architectural composite, a rendering of the past drawn with an overscientific rigor.
Poundbury is both suburb and antisuburb. It's not a freestanding development taking up greenbelt. It's connected to the town of Dorchester. There's green space in the town and, outside of it, farmland. Its homes are energy-efficient boxes with sloped roofs, forms a few hundred years old. (Not until the past 10 years have houses been as energy-efficient as those built before 1925, mostly due to the poorer quality of materials and construction.) The street plan makes it eminently walkable and bikable. While it might be faulted for effete tidiness, Poundbury has taken the long view of town-making, and, although begun 20 years ago, it remains a model of urbanist form.Poundbury was not originally built as an eco-town, but its next stage of development will involve some retrofitting with green energy, waste, water, and building technologies.
Prince Charles, no fan of green bling, favors low-tech solutions. As he said in an April 2008 address to the Congress for the New Urbanism, "We have to....achieve the lowest carbon approach possible, but within a vernacular and traditional framework." The traditional and vernacular, however, evolved before the invention of the automobile.
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