With the British royals in the news lately, I encountered Prince Charles’ current project adding to a Cornish town:

Nansledan is an extension to the Cornish coastal town of Newquay on Duchy of Cornwall land that embodies the principles of architecture and urban planning championed by HRH The Prince of Wales.

The Prince has long been concerned with the quality of the natural and built environment, urging a return to sustainable human-scale development that is land-efficient, uses low-carbon materials and is less car dependant. His vision is to plan connected urban centres where mixed-income housing, shops, offices and leisure facilities combine so that daily needs can be met within walkable neighbourhoods.

Development should enhance the quality of life, strengthen the bonds of community and place, and give people a sense of pride in where they live. Buildings should look as if they belong in the landscape, drawing on regional traditional styles, where the use of local materials and craftsmanship is vital to the aesthetic and the local economy. Nansledan is all these things, embodying timeless principles that have created enduring communities the length and breadth of Britain.

And from an article written by the Prince of Wales in The Architectural Review:

As traditional thinking teaches, basing designs on the timeless universal principles expressed by Nature’s order enables the full scope of our humanity to be fulfilled, on the physical, communal, cultural and spiritual levels.

What has concerned me about the design and planning of so many modern built environments during the greater part of the 20th century is that these four interconnecting levels have been completely abandoned and ignored, to the extent that their rediscovery is seen as an exciting revelation. Emphasis has been placed purely on the functional with no integrated understanding of how the order of Nature informs the well-being of people. Hence, towns have been systematically broken down into zones with shopping and commercial zones sitting separately from the housing zones they serve, many of which look exactly the same, being made of the same industrialized materials wherever in the country they are built. And, with business parks and leisure centres built on urban fringes, the entire system only functions because of the car. The opportunities for fragmentation and isolation are everywhere.

Three quick thoughts:

1. New Urbanism or related principles have their boosters but few would able to compete with the fame of Prince Charles. At the same time, I have never seen Prince Charles officially linked to New Urbanism, which I have mainly viewed as an American movement led by architects.
2. I do not know if New Urbanists would view themselves this way but it seems like advocating for traditional town design is truly a conservative effort. The pitch goes like this: people over the centuries figured out principles for planning communities at a human scale that worked. With industrialization, urbanization, and the spread of the automobile, we lost sight of the value of this knowledge. If the conservative movement at its best is holding onto to valuable knowledge and traditions from the past, this could be an example through calling people back to older methods.
3. It could be easy to commodify Nansledan because of its connections to royalty. Think back to the example of Celebration, Florida which was planned with New Urbanist principles: because of its connection to Disney, people were drawn to it. Yet, New Urbanism hopes to return people to a more social, community-oriented life rather than a modern commodified existence.