| Pedestrians and Downtowns | Profile of Planning Department |
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Duany and Plater-Zyberk began by studying small towns throughout the south. They looked at the layout of older neighborhoods, and what made them desirable. From this analysis, they devised methods to incorporate traditional planning principles in new developments. They suggested planners "...must return to first principles, laying out brand-new towns according to old-fashioned fundamentals, with the locations of stores, parks and schools precisely specified from the outset, with streets that invite walking, with stylistic harmony that avoids the extremes of either architectural anarchy or monotony."1
It is not a coincidence the Neotraditional movement follows on the heels of the environmental movement, brought to life by MacHarg's Design With Nature, and the historic preservation movement, which came to the forefront in the 1970s, for both were a reaction to too much growth, too fast, with too little planning. The efforts by many cities to establish "no-growth" ordinances represented this same concern, and represent the first time in history a culture hasn't invited growth.
Duany argues there is a need to reestablish the hierarchy of urbanism. The current hierarchy puts at the top our society's modern icon--the automobile; there is a need to make connections by something other than the car. Duany and Plater-Zyberk suggest the concept of the "traditional urban center," where buildings are consistently smaller in scale and come up close to the street; where structures have mixed uses, rather than single uses; where residents are given the choice of where to live, and what to be near, rather than having this defined through zoning; and where grid streets form a capillary network of connections, rather than a transportation system relying on a few major arteries.
In their plan for Seaside in Florida, Duany and Plater-Zyberk had their first chance to build their concepts, and the development has had a very influential role in the Neotraditional movement. Peter Calthorpe has also developed Neotraditional themes in his plans for what he refers to as "Transit-oriented Development." Such developments are oriented to the use of public transit, and include mixed uses, pedestrianism, and a transit terminal at a central location.2
While we have nostalgia for the loss of our downtowns, we should also weep for our present cities, for what we as a society have created in the last forty years is "pure junk." Although 90 percent of new construction has been in the suburbs, few urban designers and planners have applied themselves to these problems. As a result, today's suburbs are remarkably simple organisms, consisting of four components--housing developments, shopping centers, office parks, and occasional schools and civic buildings. These new urban areas are designed with one overriding purpose--to keep cars happy! They are designed with plenty of wide, sweeping roads and with lots of parking. Traffic engineers are treated as gods ("The battle planners are having with traffic engineers is a battle to the death."), for as engineering specialists they have a very limited view of design, and it is focused exclusively on their area of training and expertise. Being a pedestrian in the suburbs, however, is discouraged. If someone is walking, friends and neighbors inevitably pull along beside them and ask, "Do you need a ride?" for it is not socially acceptable to walk.
Suburbs are also about carefully separating different uses. In fact, there is a fantastic separation of uses. This is especially ironic, considering that the need for separation of land uses was a product of the 19th century, when there were many noxious and unhealthy land uses that needed to be separated off, especially from residential areas. In the late 20th century, nearly all land uses are compatible, and there is little need to separate residential from commercial or industrial areas.
As a result of this shift to a suburban pattern of growth, Americans now have a high standard of living, but a low quality of life. As a result of sprawl, our leisure hours are being spent in the car commuting to and from work. For a commuter who drives one hour each way to and from work, it is the equivalent of spending eight weeks every year in the car. This is eight weeks that could be spent as leisure time; in total, it would add up to three years of your child's life you had spent in the car. As a society, we have made a terrible sacrifice to the automobile.
Who else suffers from these layouts. Older people who no longer have driver's licenses, and for whom there is no viable alternative form of transportation. Kids, who need to be shuttled to friends' houses or to school activities. And the handicapped, who must rely of others for any kind of mobility. In this Darwinian approach to society, we are essentially saying these groups no longer matter, for they are not able to cope successfully.
If the suburbs are as bad as depicted by Andres Duany in the above section, what should be done? First, he says, we should not assume we can build out of the problems we have created by building more of the same. As multi-lane collector roads and urban beltways get more and more congested with traffic, it should be understood that building more lanes will not reduce congestion, but will increase it, for the more highways that are readily available, the more we will drive. Studies completed by one regional planning authority projected that Southeastern Michigan would see an increase in population by the year 2010 of 6 percent, but an increase in miles driven of 40 percent. Although the reasons for this disparity are complex, basically it means that each person will drive much more both because we want to and because we need to.
To solve this growing problem means a significant shift in out urban patterns. A first important step is to return to a traditional pattern of living closer to work. Home and work no longer need to be separated by distance to enjoy the "good life." In fact, the good life can better be enjoyed by living not separated from the urban center, but by living in it. Duany argues we should bring back the traditional urban center, because only there can be found the appropriate scale for humans, rather than for automobiles, and only there can be created a mix of land uses which brings variety and diversity to the everyday experience. He suggests it is easy to create such "magical" places as a traditional town center, as long as we don't leave it to the experts. In older communities--the kind we still think of as special--town centers weren't designed; they evolved over many generations. There was no large master plan that was drawn and built in the course of a year or two; rather, there were a continuing series of responses to previous projects, creating an urban solution that was just right for that place. Such traditional urban centers, with there intimate spaces and mixed uses, would be illegal under present ordinances. There needs to be created new ordinances which allow good things to happen, and that don't protect powerful interests through overregulation, but ordinances that respond to smaller needs as well.
In "traditional" town centers buildings are consistently smaller in scale and come up closer to the street. Inside these buildings are a great variety of functions, not defined in advance, but responding to current needs. The choice of where someone lives, and what they choose to be near or far away from, should be left to the individual, not defined by zoning. Grid street patterns should be use, rather than high-intensity collector streets. Grid patterns allow traffic to seek its own equilibrium, as a capillary network, rather than being forced into the one congested route required for all.
Traditional, or "neotraditional" town centers should encourage pedestrians by recognizing them as a legitimate means of movement. Encourage streets to have parked cars at the curbs, for such parked cars form an important protection between pedestrians and moving traffic. Traffic engineers don't like parked cars, for they slow traffic. Yet slower traffic is what an urban center needs, so throw out the engineers.
Create truly public space which give a "sense of place." We have been putting up buildings as single objects in a sea of parking, separated from each other by great distances. New urban centers should plan for human beings, not cars, by grouping buildings in closer proximity to form the walls of urban "outdoor rooms." Get value from unused space by giving it a sense of enclosure. This can be done by using an open space proportion no greater than 1 vertical to 6 horizontal; a 1 to 3 proportion is even better. The highest property values are typically found where there is such a constrained open space.
Finally, revise current regulations new allow these traditional urban centers to be built. Code writers are actually well-intentioned people, but they haven't understood the long-term impacts of their codes and ordinances. It is time to give them a chance to open these ordinances to more traditional techniques of development, and to base them on the late 19th/early 20th century prototype.
Americans have become too rich and wasteful. For four hundred years we were poor, and we designed better cities with such restraints. With wealth came waste, and the feeling of building out of all of our problems, rather than dealing with them directly.
Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and the other planners forming the core of the Neotraditional planning movement, have had a tremendous impact on planning in the past decade. They have changed how we see cities, both old and new. The concepts of "traditional town planning" are now beginning to be used in suburban areas, as these communities realize their commercial areas have no focus, and no core. This approach, also known as "The New Urbanism," has grown into an important new movement attracting a lot of interest.
Like the Modernists before them, New Urbanists believe they can change human behavior through design. Postwar car-dependent suburbs, once regarded as the realization of the American Dream, are to New Urbanist the roots of an alienated, wasteful, isolated society. Give Americans a traditional neighborhood to live in, New Urbanist reason, and they will behave like neighbors. Give two-income, two-car families a walkable grid of narrow streets, sidewalks, and corner stores, and they will rid themselves of one car. Give suburbanites a mix of housing types, from condominiums to rowhouses to detached houses, and a mix of people will occupy them. Give homeowners front porches, and they will eschew the TV, the air-conditioning, and the Internet, and talk to each other.4
Neotraditional planners are redesigning the ubiquitous shopping center or mall into complexes oriented not to the parking lot, but to the sidewalk, trying to establish more of a "town center."
"..Here and there, brand-new "town centers" are popping up amid the subdivisions, sometimes the result of conscious pressure by residents who miss the traditional urban downtown.These emerging town centers are not to be confused with the so-called urban villages ['edge cities'] that have recently captured wide-spread attentionÑplaces like Tyson's Corner, Virginia, where agglomerations of office towers and shopping centers have been built without much coordination, quickly becoming awash in automobile traffic.
Rather, the new suburban town centers are the result of conscious planning, aimed at creating compact places with a lively mixture of activities. They put housing, shopping, offices, and public gathering places close to one another, allowing residents to walk to work, to local stores and entertainment, and to parks and other public facilities.5
One example of such a planned town center is found in Reston, Virginia. When Reston was first built in the 1960s, the developer, Robert E. Simon, had financial problems and plans for the town center languished. However, many residents, as well as the development company, clung to the idea of building an important "downtown" for this "New Town."
The big question was what form the "urban core"--the densest part of the 460-acre town center district--should take.Over time, the answer has changed dramatically. A 1974 plan by David A. Crane and Partners of Philadelphia envisioned much of the urban core as a monolithic set of buildings rising from an underground parking garage... In 1986, the Baltimore architecture and planning firm of RTKL Associates presented a design akin to that of a traditional, grid-planned American town, except that the principal street extended for only 1,000 feet (about 3.5 blocks), a length modeled on shopping mall corridors. The blocks in RTKL's plan were smaller than those in the 1974 design. Stores, restaurants, and offices were to face the streets.
...What's particularly notable is that Sasaki Associates, the landscape architecture firm located in Watertown, Massachusetts, last year persuaded the developers, as their next step, to double the length of Market Street, making it much more like a traditional town's main street. The extension will connect it to offices, a second hotel, a park, and a substantial amount of housing.
Reston residents have already raised questions about the lack of retail diversity in the town center. There will be no five-and-ten, no discount store, not even an off-price retailer like T.J. Maxx. 'A concern that people have expressed is that the town center will be so high-end that it don't serve the community,' says Joseph Stowers, a resident. He notes that Reston's income distribution is lower than the county average and that the community includes a fair amount of elderly and multifamily housing.
Those are not the people Reston's town center is meant to serve, however. As it is shaping up, the center is likely to lack the economic and social diversity that gives many traditional downtowns their vitality--but also, of course, their social problems. While the town center promises to be a handsome place with a mix of uses--providing a focus where there was none before--it still comes across as mainly a commercial enterprise rather than as a realm shaped by and for the public, not surprising in a community that lacks a basic ingredient of town life--its own local government. The reason for that goes back to the feeling of developer Robert Simon that he faced enough of a challenge in getting Reston under way; he was content to let the county bear responsibility for police and fire protection, schools, and other public services."6
1 Kurt Andersen. 1991. "Oldfangled New Towns." Time (May 20, 1991). p. 52.
2 See Peter Calthorpe. 1993. The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.
3 Taken from a talk by Andres Duany at the American Institute of Architects National Convention in Washington, D.C. May 1991.
4 Heidi Landecker. 1996. "Is New Urbanism Good for America?" Architecture. April 1996. p. 68.
5 Langdon, Philip. "Pumping Up Suburban Downtowns." Planning. July 1990. p. 22.
6 Ibid. pp. 25-26.
| Pedestrians and Downtowns | Profile of Planning Department |
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| Seaside, Florida |
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