Back in the 1990s, architect Andres Duany routinely gave a powerful touring lecture at universities and city halls throughout the U.S. on what was then his novel idea of New Urbanism. At the time, New Urbanism offered the promise of a paradigm change back to the principles of traditional urbanism that had been largely abandoned by postwar suburbanization, and Duany's touring lecture was instrumental in its general promotion.
This video is of the 1991 seminar and slide show delivered and rebroadcast in San Antonio, Texas, as "San Antonio By Design":
• Video Link
This YouTube playlist offers a better quality version of the recording, but it is broken into 9 parts.
30 years later, has anything really changed? For San Antonio, not yet so much as the sprawl and poverty is perhaps still too overwhelming. However, I attended another, later version of this seminar which Duany delivered in Austin's convention center in the mid '90s. While I cannot point to any causal impact or particular project, there was the palpable sense of a general sea change in urban outlook in Austin throughout the late 1990s that was soon enough followed by a dramatic building boom, involving many of the architects, planners, developers, businessmen, bureaucrats, officials, and then-students who would have been in that seminar at the time.
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