Harry Potter, New Urbanism and Building on a Human Scale
I have finally caught up with all the Harry Potter movies over the last couple of weeks and one thing struck me while watching: when Harry and the wizard-kind enter their magical realm, which parallels the mundane world, things suddenly "feel" right in that wizard world, - somehow more welcoming even with the creepy bits. Why is that?
The Human Scale
The urban spaces in the Harry Potter wizarding world, as depicted in the movies, show narrow Elizabethan streets with early Victorian shops and storefronts. The sense of scale is all pre-automobile - streets are narrow, twisty, compact and compressed - intended for humans to walk about in not for machines. This is how humans lived in towns and cities for thousands of years. It feels right, natural, organic. There are not too many blank walls, straight lines or squared corners - it is a Western engineer's nightmare but in Eastern philosophy it has the right amount of Yin and Yang. Watch the movies and see if you don't feel the same.
New Urbanism
For the last 100 years automobiles have increasingly defined how we design where we live, work, play and trade. Streets have become wider, straighter, faster with each generation, which may be good for automobiles but it has taken its toll on us humans with vast sun-baked parking lots paved with asphalt replacing interesting storefronts. Building for an automobile culture has brought increased social isolation, Big Box retail, dependence on imported oil, sprawl and loss of a sense of place. Things have gotten too big - we have lost our sense of human scale.
The dilemma is that the automobile is not (and should not) go away any time soon. Therefore we need to accommodate both our need for building our world in a human scale AND for the automobile for our basic transportation. This is exactly the question that New Urbanism is trying to tackle: Can we build a world that recognizes both the need for human scale neighborhoods where we can walk, but also accommodate the use of cars? That's it, no snake oil, no religious zeal, New Urbanism is simply a fusion of pre-automobile design with a nod to the car. It's how we used to build our cities before the car took over.
References:
Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream at Amazon.
