The city's 15 urban villages are counterintuitive, ahistorical, and outmoded. They reflect an out-of-date suburban planning approach based on the false promise of jobs and commercial development clustered around arbitrarily defined village cores. Even if successful, this plan would have negative effects in terms of promoting job sprawl, but the approach has many other drawbacks.

First, the urban villages are too large to function as neighborhoods but too small to encourage regional thinking. They fit into a sort of anti-Goldilocks middle area which serves almost no one's needs.

Second, the urban villages are arbitrarily named and defined. A sign at Central and Northern declares that one is entering "Alhambra Village," but no resident of North Central Phoenix would agree with that. Alhambra is several miles southwest of that intersection. The areas that most Phoenicians consider "Biltmore" and "Arcadia" are instead given the unappealing moniker "Camelback East." Worst of all, the signs welcoming people to "Laveen Village" confuse residents about where they live. I've had people tell me they live on the Phoenix / Laveen border. When I tell them that Laveen is part of Phoenix, they say they thought the "Laveen Vilage" signs denoted a separate municipality. In this case, the urban villages are undermining civic cohesion.

For all these reasons, the urban villages should be considered a planning approach that has run its course. It's time to retire them and focus instead on neighborhoods -- smaller divisions of the city that reflect intuitive borders such as canals, mountains, and arterial streets. In some cases, neighborhood identity is already established. In many other cases, residents define their part of the city only in terms of major cross streets. In those cases, the city can facilitate a naming process. Great cities are made of great neighborhoods. Let's focus on cultivating those rather than maintaining artificial urban villages.