Seaside at 30, Midwest New Urbanism and CNU21

I spent part of this past week exploring Seaside, Florida. I'll spend the remainder of this week in Salt Lake City at CNU21 thanks to the good people at Streetsblog.net. Seaside is a master-planned community near Destin and one of the first places in the U.S. to be designed on the principles of New Urbanism. As such, Seaside has become the topic of numerous lectures in colleges of architecture, about urbanism and dense development and in housing-industry magazines. It's become a celebrated destination of study for design professionals from across the country and abroad.

From a personal perspective, I thought Seaside was awful. I'll explain what I mean: There's a reason The Truman Show was filmed here. They needed a homogenous, well-ordered, very clean, nearly artificial, setting. For all the celebration of varied design and architectural detail, and 30 years over which to evolve, Seaside feels quite staid. But that's what's it's supposed to be, right? It's a resort community with an average home price of more than $1,000,000. It's certainly more town-like than most destinations on the Florida panhandle, but is that it?