The paper argues) that the principles of New Urbanism are part of a long-standing, well-articulated school of thought about urban problems and their solutions, which is shared by a great many urban reformers, but that critiques of New Urbanism too often have focused not on these principles but on either the assumptions on which new urbanist arguments have been (not very effectively) articulated, or on the problems of its implementation, neither of which are fatal. It calls for a restructured debate that takes these varying levels of discourse into account, and mounts an investigation of the causes of implementation failure.