Urban Planning Activism...

"New urbanism also derives an elite demand that any reformulation of urban patterns mandates the creation of expensive, elite zones through the use of redevelopment and/or other states subsidies. Numerous new urbanist developments are in reality re-creating the class and exclusionary policies of failed suburbia. Affordable housing for the working class is too advanced for a perspective that translates into an economic fear of ethnic minorities in the neighborhood. Sound familiar? It should. Without exclusionary home pricing, new urbanists are also repeating the cultural failure of suburbia, the re-establishment of a system of residential apartheid. in the guise of an enlightened, "post" modern urbanism. There is nothing "postmodern" about ethnic and class exclusion, tactically, theoretically, or practically. Yet, when proponents of this perspective fail to criticize new developments and transit centers as nothing more than another formulation of privelaged economic development zones due to an acute lack and/or no affordable housing, they inherently support urban economic apartheid" (Diaz, 2005).

This is David Diaz-- he is an Assoc. Prof. at California State U at Northridge. His book on the barrios of the southwestern urban cities of the US is amazing, and especially important now at a time when interest in development in urban centers is being taken up by those in all fields, even environmentalism with a inadequate class and racial understanding.