The documentary tells of the life and work – not entirely in that order – of Michael E. Arth, a latter-day hippie entrepreneur, architect, artist and urban planner with allegiances to the New Urbanism movement and the father of its offshoot, New Pedestrianism.
What is this New Urbanism, you might ask? And the film is happy to answer: it’s a philosophy of residential development that seeks to redress the failures of tract suburbanism by creating small communities in which home and business intermingle as in the city or Mayberry, rather than the islands of commercial development and residential neighborhoods that demand the use of a car for an action as simple as driving to the nearest grocery story for milk. Arth’s New Pedestrianism is simply New Urbanism with more emphasis placed on eliminating the day-to-day need for cars.
To demonstrate the desirability of a New Urban lifestyle, New Urban Cowboy spends most of its fleet 83 minutes recounting Arth’s greatest success: restoring the nightmarish “cracktown” of downtown DeLand, Florida, and turning into an edenic garden district with loving restored homes and green everywhere; a project begun in 2001 and largely completed only a couple of years later. Along the way, we get to learn a great deal about Arth’s life, from Texas to California to Florida, and his constant need to find something meaningful. The film is at its best as a character study of the strange but endearing Arth, with his extraordinary convenient but completely non-invented name, and his boundless sense that right will out.
As an argument for New Urbanism? I’m not certain. Clearly, the film is propaganda – it’s not a dirty word, just a descriptive one – and the point is not to raise every good argument against the philosophy. But those arguments do seep in around the edges, and they’re good ones. When directly confronted with the question of whether his DeLand project is mere gentrification, chasing the poor and the non-white out, Arth simply says “no” and the film takes his word for it. A government official, asked if he knows where the dealers and users of the former Cracktown ended up, says he doesn’t care as long as it’s in another country. And by the way, what’s so wrong with Old Urbanism, living in the many big cities we’ve already got that are built just like Arth’s dreams – is New Urbanism really anything else but a more eye-pleasing form of suburban sprawl? The film doesn’t treat these as real complaints, but simply quibbles – because hey, the Garden District sure looks nice, doesn’t it? Yes, but if it’s only because of Arth’s hippie-fascist image control, it’s not much of a model. I’m not saying that New Urbanism is bad or that Arth is a fraud – only that New Urban Cowboy isn’t interested in convincing me otherwise. It’s entertaining and thought-provoking and certainly made with the purest intentions, but it’s just a subtler version of that same preaching to the choir that scuttles so many issue films.