Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis (1993) set out principles for compact, walkable, transit-oriented development as an alternative to car-dependent sprawl, popularising the transit-oriented development (TOD) model clustered around stations. The Charter of the New Urbanism, adopted by the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1996, codified twenty-seven principles spanning the region, the neighbourhood and the block, calling for mixed uses, connected streets and a range of housing types. Together they gave the New Urbanist movement a written doctrine. Both drew on traditional pre-war town patterns to argue against single-use zoning and the cul-de-sac subdivision.
They defined New Urbanism as a coherent reform movement and pushed transit-oriented and mixed-use development into mainstream North American planning practice and many municipal codes. Their proximity-and-walkability principles influenced later compact-city and 15-minute-city thinking.