Neotraditional Towns and Urban Villages: The Cultural Production of a Geography of ‘Otherness’

Abstract

The ‘neotraditional’ planning movement in the USA is criticized through an analysis of promotional materials for the urban village of Rancho Santa Margarita in Orange County, CA. The ‘traditions’ of towns and villages are viewed as recent ‘inventions’ created by corporate planners; they are attempts to validate the establishment of residential communities through ambiguous, yet familiar, historical symbols. Yet the identities constructed for neotraditional towns and urban villages make sense only in relation to the ‘other’. In southern Orange County, corporate planners present their master-planned communities as ‘distant’ from the suburbs and cities located in Los Angeles and in northern Orange County according to a scale of temporal, geographic, and social values. Implicit to neotraditionalism is a geography of otherness. This geography reinforces existing social and spatial divisions, promotes reactionary and exclusionary territorial identities, and legitimizes the status quo.