Duh! This suprises you? Some of my liberal Democrat buds are the biggest NIMBYs when it comes to compact communities. And, they can't understand that it IS possible to get somewhere without a large vehicle under their butts. The fact that any vehicle, even the best hybrid still vandalizes the built environment totally escapes them.
Then you have Andrés Duany, quite the New Urbanist, and one of the more right wing people that I know of.
I think trying to label good urbanism as either a liberal or conservative cause is at best pointless and at worst counterproductive.
For instance, I think Death and Life of Great American Cities is at heart profoundly conservative. Yet it is the driving document of so many supposedly liberal causes.
This is why I call myself a progressive. It's about your thought processes and approach. Remember Molotch and the Growth Machine. Development has its own political and economic force.
But there is good development or bad development. Generally, Democrats are more oriented to "use value" issues, and Republicans tend to be more focused on the untrammeled rights of the property owner, which allows for the disregarding of how a particular piece of property connects to the world outside of the lot lines, and how it impacts us.
As Churchill said, "We shape our buildings. Afterwards, our buildings shape us."
Once you get into arguments--even in DC--about property rights and the property owner, that design quality is merely a question of aesthetics, etc., it's hard to think of _Death and Life_ as profoundly "conservative."
Well I don't want to get too much into it, because I think it's an equally progessive book, but I think there are strong conservative strains throughout it. I'm not saying she fits in with the modern Republican party or even the majority of what people call "conservative" these days, but rather that she was driven as much by the preservation of a way of life than anything else, which I think is fundamentally a conservative impulse, in the most historic meaning of that word. Which is to say that she better represents what conservatives should advocate rather than to say she advocated the same things that modern conservatives advocate.
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