ABSTRACT
The high tide of the most recent real-estate and development boom, of 1984-9, has left American cities with some remarkable new landscapes. Private, master-planned communities have appeared — or at least begun to appear — around every large metropolitan area, creating a series of 'artful fragments' 1 that seem likely to prefigure the postsuburban form of the fin de millénium metropolis. Unlike their distant antecedents in the Garden City and New Town movements, their provenance is almost entirely from within the private sector, their objectives being concerned less with planning and urban design as solutions to problems of urbanization than as solutions to the problem of securing profitable new niches within the urban development industry. At the same time, they are radically different in scale, layout and composition from the residential subdivisions that have characterized the past forty years or more of metropolitan decentralization. Above all, they are distinctive because of the extent to which they are packaged. The hallmarks of private master-planned communities are their packages of amenities and their packaging within a unified design framework.
