New Urbanism

It’s reminiscent of the new urbanism of the Disney-created Celebration or Seaside, Fla., where “The Truman Show” was filmed, or, indeed, a Hollywood backlot, with its old-fashioned “town square” recognizable from myriad movies and TV shows.

The flagship development of the New Urbanism school of city planning, made famous among nonarchitects as the setting for The Truman Show, was born in the era of “peak oil,” and designed to be a rejection of the nation’s sprawling development patterns.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s.

Robert Steuteville, of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a D.C. nonprofit that advocates for walkable cities, agreed, adding the notion also isn’t all that novel: most cities built before 1950, when highways and suburbs became dominant, were 15-minute cities.

To promote his ideas on traditional architecture on what he calls “the human scale,” Charles has created — completely from scratch — an experimental planned community for 6,000 residents and 180 businesses, called Poundbury, with low-rise buildings, front gardens, reduced car use, designed upon the “new urbanism” that the king has called his “vision for Britain.”