Topics
of Interest
"Smart
Growth" and "The New Urbanism"
The
"New Urbanist" approach to urban design emerged during the mid 1980's
from the work of Andes Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk in Florida, with
their immensely successful town of Seaside, and from "sustainable"
community designers, architects, and theorists on the west coast, such as
Peter Calthorpe and Douglas Kelbaugh. The communities generated by this
new breed of urban designers seek to reverse the suburban sprawl paradigm
that has been dominant since the early 50's.
New Urbanism is a complete 180 degree turn about with regard to the zoning
and urban planning ideas which have been mainstream for four decades. The
cul-de-sac, feeder street, and arterial strip which were the darling of 50's
and 60's subdivision are now to a demon which forces all local traffic out
onto crowded arterial highways, even if to only visit a friend a few blocks
away. Parcel (postage stamp) zoning, which had been in place for decades,
allowing only a single specialized use of each lot, has given way to zoning
which encourages mixed-use development where residences may occupy the upper
floors of a development, and workplaces, offices, and retail may occupy the
lower floors of the development. Density, mixed-use, and "Smart Growth"
become the main operative words replacing sprawl and separation of land use
The new urbanists praise the street grid and type of urban neighborhoods constructed
in the 1920's, a time when there was a balance between pedestrian movement,
vehicular thoroughfares, and public transit in the form of street car and
city rail systems. The new urbanist neighborhood, whether it in new
growth areas or infill development, spins a web that tightens the density
of the urban fabric with streets and sidewalks that allow walk-able as well
as vehicular movement. By tightening this fabric, the street once again
becomes a public space for people, as well as cars. Building setbacks which
were once encouraged to maintain an expansive suburban feel are now discouraged.
Mixed use buildings with street level retail are set-back from the street
only by the width of a sidewalk. Homes are encouraged to have front
porches and to relate to the age-old pedestrian way, the sidewalk.
Denser neighborhoods with sidewalks and front porches to encourage pedestrian
activity, can be applied in many areas of Western North Carolina. However,
the slope of the terrain and natural land features determine to a large
extent traffic movement patterns, which tend to be arterial, with feeder branches
and ultimately in mountain coves, cul-de-sacs. The cross-directional street
grid that applies so well to coastal Florida, must be revised here to work
with the shape of the land. Still, many of the new urbanist ideas like
encouraging higher density neighborhoods as an alternative to suburban sprawl
can be applied to the Asheville area. Asheville is seeking to implement
many of these ideas in its 2025 Development Plan.
Recommended Reading:
1) The New Urbanism, Towards an Architecture of Community
Peter Katz, 1994
2) The Next American Metropolis, Ecology, Community and
the American Dream,
Peter Calthorpe, 1995
3) Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design
Douglas Kelbaugh, 1997
4) The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Jane Jacobs, 1961, 1989
My
Back Pages
The
following except to an article by Douglas Kelbaugh outlines several "Urbanisms"
or concepts of urban development. None of these three apply in total
to physical development outcomes, but each is a force which in some
combination with the others determines the manifested urban form.
"Three
Urbanisms....
Beyond the conventional, unselfconscious development that is changing the
face of our downtowns and suburbs, there are at least three self-conscious
schools of urbanism: Everyday Urbanism, New Urbanism, and what I call
Post Urbanism....
Everyday Urbanism is neither utopian nor tidy. It celebrates and builds on
ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a
perfectible built environment. Its proponents are open to and incorporate
ephemerality, cacophony, and simultaneity. It, for instance, champions the
way migrant workers overcome their marginal environments in resourceful and
imaginative ways, appropriating space for commerce and festivals in perking
lots and vacant lots, as well as private driveways and yards for garage sales.
It values vernacular architecture and street life in vibrant, ethnic neighborhoods,
like the Latino barrios of Los Angeles and Mexicantown in Detroit. Everyday
Urbanism promotes locally owned industry, public markets rather than chain
stores, and street murals rather than civic art. Its key words might be grassroots
and justice.
New Urbanism, on the other hand, is idealistic, even utopian because it aspires
to build new or repair old communities in ways that mix people of different
architectural types. It sponsors civic architecture and public space that
attempt to make citizens feel part, even proud, of a culture that is more
significant and more universal than their individual, private worlds and part
of a natural ecology that is more sustainable. It maintains that there is
a structural relationship between social behavior and physical form and that
a sense of place is essential. The model is a compact, walkable city, served
by transit with a hierarchy of private and public architect and outdoor spaces
that are conducive to face-to-face social interaction-Elm Street and Main
Street. While appealing to traditionalists, its 24-hour/7-day mix of uses
also appeals to the dotcommers of the new Economy. Its key words might be
balance and continuity.
Post Urbanism, which is de rigeur among the hottest star architects,
and the most popular with faculty and students around the work, is not utopian.
It is heterotopian, that is, full of difference and opposition. It welcomes
disconnected, hypermodern buildings and destabilized urbanism. It discounts
shared values or a common ethos as no longer possible in a fragmenting world
of isolated zones. These zones which include spaces for the "other"
as well as for shoppers and free-range tourists, are viewed as liberating
because they allow for new forms of knowledge, new hybrid possibilities, new
unpredictable forms of freedom and, perhaps most of all, for spectacle. Projects
are usually self-contained, with little faith in the work of others to complete
the urban fabric that Post Urbanists champion. Signature building designed
by name architects and a sprawling, auto-centric city like Atlanta are held
up as exemplary. Its key words might be flux and audacity....
The three paradigms lead to very different physical outcomes. Everyday Urbanism,
which is the most informal and the least driven by design, has trouble achieving
beauty or coherence, but is egalitarian and lively on the street. New Urbanism,
with its Latinate clarity and finite formal order, achieves the most aesthetic
unity and human scale using familiar architectural types and styles, but usually
by being overly-traditional, even trite, in its architecture. It embraces
Euclidean geometry but eschews Euclidean zoning. Its connective grids of pedestrian-oriented
streets look better from the ground than the air, from which they can sometimes
look formulaic and overly symmetrical. Post Urbanism is as formal as New Urbanism,
but in a more open-ended and abstract way. Its site plans always look the
most spectacular, with their acute fractal geometries and sweeping circulatory
systems. However, its designs are often over scaled and empty for pedestrians.
Tourists in rental cars experiencing the world through their windshields are
often a better-served audience than residents on foot, for whom there is little
human-scale nuance and architectural detail to reveal itself. (Post Urbanists
might suggest that we are all becoming tourists in our own city, just as tourists
are, conversely, becoming citizens of the world.) Although New Urbanism takes
ecological sustain-ability the most seriously, none of the three paradigms
are responsive enough to this imperative, which we ignore at our own peril.
Everyday Urbanism may make sense in developing countries where global cities
are mushrooming with squatter settlements that defy government control and
planning, and where underserved populations simply want a stake in the economic
system. But it doesn't make sense in the cities of Europe, where the luxury
of working in and with a mature urban fabric makes Post Urbanism viable. In
American cities, which lack the continuous, traditional fabric of European
cities, I believe we need to steer a middle course closer to New Urbanism,
a course that learns from the social justice of Everyday Urbanism and the
artistic sophistication of Post Urbanism. We need not give up tectonics for
urbanism, or vice versa. We can be balanced and passionate at the same time."
