New Urbanism, Automobile Dependency and Sense of Community: A Comparative Study of Two Residential Developments in California

Abstract

This paper resumes a research that concentrated in the effectiveness of residential urban design in response to some of the key tenets of new urbanism. Our original questions were: a) how this design truly reflects on the daily lives of the communities’ residents; and b) how residents perceive it? To answer these questions, the research focused on (1) automobile dependency and (2) sense of community, as the two major variables of new urbanism.