A land-use geek battle royale

New Urbanists vs. Landscape Urbanists (h/t Ritholtz):

In their lectures and writings, Waldheim and other landscape urbanists paint the New Urbanists as nostalgically stuck in a conception of city life that ignores the changes brought by the modern service economy, the Internet, and the highway system. Americans have unequivocally demonstrated that they would prefer to live spread out, and the landscape urbanists argue it’s a delusion to believe that one can force the toothpaste back in the tube with zoning laws and design schemes.

“This notion of city center and suburb is a counterproductive differentiation,” said Pierre Bélanger, one of the new landscape professors at Harvard. “Cities and suburbs are actually part of urban economies.”

Proponents of the New Urbanism have not been taking the accusations of obsolescence sitting down. In a widely circulated November essay on the website of Metropolis magazine, Duany mockingly cast the rise of landscape urbanism at Harvard as a “classic Latin American-style...coup.” His fellow New Urbanists have weighed in with more substantive critiques that have been equally harsh. One planning professor in Arizona attacked the landscape urbanists for caring more about nature than humans; on the planning website Planetizen, the Portland, Ore.-based urban design theorist Michael Mehaffy published an indictment of landscape urbanism called “Sprawl in a Pretty Green Dress?”

Man, these guys don't play nice.