All Intensive Purposes

The New Urbanists plan a better coastal Mississippi:

It took six days for the Congress for the New Urbanism to come up with a rough set of recommendations for the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast -- six exhausting and exhilarating days spent hashing out everything from highway relocations to affordable housing. To add local flavor, the architects scoured old books of photographs and put together a "pattern book" for builders, portraying traditional Gulf Coast architecture: Creole cottages with gabled roofs and louvered windows, Victorian houses with dormers and narrow-columned porches.

When it was done, the plan for Biloxi showed a picturesque little city, with graceful boulevards and pretty streets flanked by neat houses and stately mansions and even the casinos concealed in stylish towers. The Back Bay harbor, where shrimpers moored their boats, had been augmented with a seafood market and a waterside promenade for tourists. A rail line had been moved, and so had one of the bridges. There were parks and squares everywhere and, according to the architects' elegant renderings, tall trees lining almost every road (though, in fact, the hurricane had destroyed many of the city's trees, and it would take decades to grow new ones). It looked like a quintessential sleepy Southern city, or perhaps a parody of one.

Jim Lewis, "Battle for Biloxi," The New York Times Magazine 100, 102 (May 21, 2006).

eta: Winterspeak links to the article, and to a piece about New Urbanism in Glen View, Illinois.