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All three envisioned urban utopias that would constitute radical reconstructions of the city so as to eliminate features that they believed to be baneful, such as high density and mixed uses.86 Yet, these very features are now extolled as virtues of the "traditional" urban environment and the goal of most New Urbanist planning. 2. Accidental Urbanism Even where specific notions of traditional Urbanism can be articulated as the basis of a distinct New Urbanism, it is important to recognize that regardless of form, traditional Urbanism, was, for the most part, accidental. The irony of New Urbanism is that it trades on the accidental development of the past and attempts to make it manifest via an explicit, highly stylized planning scheme such as form-based code. With New Urbanism, as with some of the urban utopia movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the past is appropriated to legitimate the roots of what was and is a very new endeavor. New Urbanism seeks to rationalize a desire for that which was never necessarily intended to exist in any particular form. g' So- called best practices in urban planning and urban living are often based on revisionist high points of the past which glide over flaws in order to sustain the myth of our ideal urban past. gg Perhaps most damning to the goal of reinstating the urban past is that it is none too clear that this represents the way that people in current cities want to live. 86 Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier 3-4 (1982). 87 Robert Freestone, Learning From Planning's Histories, in Urban Planning in a Changing World: The Twentieth Century Experience 1,2 (Robert Freestone ed., 2000). 88 Id. 24