Ticky Tacky Houses

The idea of “everyday urbanism” is the most realistic urban ideal that I have encountered in my education. I took a theory class in undergrad where the professor was very much enamored with New Urbanism. We looked at the city through the New Urbanist lens and studied New Urbanist developments. The movement’s formula makes perfect sense. We can improve urbanism of levels of the region, the neighborhood, and the block. An urban space should be dense, walkable, diverse, sustainable, and connected. New Urbanism gets all the ideals right, but it gets the execution so wrong. My class took a trip to I’on in Mt. Pleasant to see a New Urbanist development first hand. I found the place to be eerie in a Stepford Wives sort of way. It was an inauthentic version of downtown Charleston. Everything was too perfect, too planned. Yes, the neighborhood was dense, walkable, and diverse, but the self contained suburban neighborhood of ticky tacky houses somehow missed the point. 

Everyday Urbanism seems like a much more realistic and organic approach to creating good urban spaces. It makes sense to approach urbanism through the mundane activities of everyday life. If you interact with a place every single day, shouldn’t it be easy, accessible, and natural? The city can grow and readapt itself to suit the changing needs of its users. Urbanism can be organic. If we focus on improving people’s everyday lives in the urban environment, the physical changes in the environment will naturally be diverse and dense. There is no need for over planned ticky tacky houses and keeping up the the Joneses.