Sustainable Urbanism — Design for Urbanism & The Urban Footprint

Chapters 4–5 of Peter Calthorpe’s Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change. The distinction Kyle underlined: “Design is multidimensional problem solving, while engineering is single-issue optimization” — and the consequence, that suburbs and cities fail less from lack of engineering than from lack of design.

Part of the New City reading list — the books Kyle worked through while building the The New City thesis. Indexed on that page.

Notes

• From Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change by P. Calthorpe
• Design for Urbanism (Chpt. 4)
• Design is multidimensional problem solving, while engineering is tingle-issue optimization.
• The problem is not only that our suburbs and cities lack design, but that, since World War II they have been designed according to the wrong paradigm.
• Specialization
• In planning, the term specialization has multiple meanings. First was that each aspect of community design should be isolated and professionalized. Civil engineers, traffic engineers, environmental scientist, economists, landscape designers, and architects as well as bankers, realtors, and appraiser, each came to control their own standards, codes, and policies— to command literally separate areas of our community land use maps. Each area within they map was matched by a parallel department in government. Hence the complex multi use agendas historically layered into our streets, public spaces and even buildings devolved into simplistic single-use zones.
• Standardization
• As a complement to specialization, standardization led quickly to the homogenization of our communities, a blindness to history, and the demise of many ecological systems. A “one size fits all” mentality of efficiency overrode the unique and often irreplaceable qualities of place an d community.
• Mass Production
• Mass production (in housing, transportation, offices, and so forth) upended the delicate balance that once existed between craft, local enterprise, regional identity, and global networks.
• Unlike the isolated governmental categories of economic development, housing, education, and social services, each of these design principles brings together physical design, social programs, and economic strategies. These principles, then, should form the foundation of a new urban design ethic.
• Human Scale
• Human scale in economics means supporting individual entrepreneurs and local businesses. Human scale in community design means a walkable neighborhood focus and an environment that encourages everyday face-to-face interaction.
• Diversity
• In community design, diversity has overlapping layers of physical, economic, and social meanings. The four fundamental components of any community—civic places, commercial uses, housing opportunities, and natural systems—define the physical dimensions of diversity at any scale.
• Complete housing integration may be a distant goal, but inclusive neighborhoods that broaden the economic range, expand the mix of age and household types, and open the door to racial integration are feasible and desirable. The success of the HOPE VI program to replace single-income federal housing projects with mixed-income communities is a dramatic demonstration that this principle can be realized even at our social extremes.
• Diversity in use, population, enterprise, and natural systems are fundamental to a sustainable future.
• Conservation
• Conservation implies caring for what we have and developing an ethic of reuse and repair, in our physical and social realms as well as natural landscapes. Restoration and conservation are more than environmental themes; they are an approach to the way that we think about community at bot hthe regional and local levels.
• “Use it up, wear it out. Make do, or do without.”
• Conserving human resources is another implication of this principle. In too many of our communities, poverty, lack of education, and declining job opportunities lead to a tragic waste of human potential. As we have seen, communities are not viable when concentrations of poverty turn them into a wasteland of despair and crime. In this context, the term conservation takes on a larger meaning: the stewardship, restoration, and rehabilitation of human potential wherever it is being squandered and overlooked. There should be no natural or cultural environments that are disposable or marginalized. Conservation and restoration are practical undertakings that can be economically empowering and socially enriching.
• These three principles—human scale, diversity and conservation—set the foundation for a new direction in community design. Sprawl and its regional structure are a manifestation of an older and markedly different paradigm: the industrial qualities of mass production, standardization and specialization. As a counterpoint, the principles and concurrences of human scale, diversity and conservation define a new paradigm for the next generation of growth, one that leads from sprawl to sustainable communities. These principles need to be expressed at the scale of local community and the regional metropolis. Regional design is beginning to emerge as a key to our economic, social, and environmental health. It can be guided by the same urban design principles that work for neighborhoods and towns.
• Seen as this integrated whole, the region can be designed in much the same way as we would design a neighborhood.
• Just as a neighborhood needs a vital center to serve as its crossroads, the regions needs a vital central city to serve as its cultural heart and link to the larger economy. In sprawl, both types of centers are failing as remote discount centers and relentless commercial strips overcome what were historic town centers with human scale. In the central cities, poverty and disinvestment erode historic neighborhoods as the central business districts decants jobs to dispersed suburban office parks. Both fall prey to specialized enterprises oriented to mass distribution rather than the local community. Like our natural and civic “commons,” these urban and suburban centers are fundamental to local and regional coherence.
• Regionalism Emerging
• Effective regionalism does not imply that each town give sup land use control. Board policies, goals, and infrastructure criteria can be established at the regional scale that local governments can then develop and implement through their comprehensive plans and design codes. The region, in cooperation with local governments, can establish goals and policies in several general areas, including preservation of regional open space systems, efficient infrastructure configurations, the location of major job centers, significant transportation investments, and fair-share ousting goals. Within these regionally set parameters, each local government can design a unique plan fro growth that defines all the elects of their community: housing, circulation, open space, land use, and urban design.
• Envision Utah showed that taken piece by piece, individuals tend to oppose denser development, but when shown the cumulative loss of open space, affordable housing, and the additional tax burden caused by sprawl, their response can be quite different. A mail-back survey included in the local newspaper describing the Envision Utah alternatives showed that only 4 percent of the respondents preferred the trend of low-density growth alternative while over 66 percent voted for he more compact alternatives.
• Since this effort was launched, the stated passed the Quality Growth Act. Like the land management approach in Maryland, this legislation puts into place a commission to designate” Smart growth” areas that will become the focus of new development and redevelopment. These areas will have state and federal priority for new infrastructure and services. Other areas, although not specifically outside of a UGB (urban growth boundary), will have to pay their own costs of development without public subsidies.
• A definitive regional plan is a necessary precondition for the kind of urbanism described here and that citizen participation is a key to its success. When given clear information and a picture of ht aggregate impacts of piecemeal, fragmented growth, most citizens opt for very progressive policies, even in historically conservative areas. This involves a critical shift in perspective: seeing growth in terms of its total impacts rather than one project at a time. Regional challenges get different responses than local questions.
• The Urban Footprint (Chpt. 5)
• Translating the design principles of traditional and green urbanism into practical standards for development involves rethinking the basic building blocks of the regions and its jurisdictions—creating a new armature of circulation along with a new language for zoning and planning. In the end, our transportation system will shift from auto centric roads and highways to a finer-grainded, more connected network that provides for the pedestrian, bikes and transit as well as autos—what are now called “complete streets.” Likewise, our approach to planning will shift form segregated single-use zones to a rich, find-grained lexicon of mixed-use places and communities. Rather than the simplistic land use destinations found on most zoning maps today, diverse “place types” are needed to design complete regions, cities, and towns. There are five basic categories of such a place based approach to community design: neighborhoods, centers, districts, preserves and corridors.
• Neighborhoods: the most basic building block of a community. They are, by definition, walkable areas that integrate a range of housing with parks, schools and local services. At their best, neighborhoods offer a way of knowing and connecting to people who are not just like us. Social capital broadens people’s send of self from “I” to “we” and encourages them to work together on community problems. Community life—and even effective democracy— depends for its strength and vibrancy on the kind of informal networks that can be created only be a dense web of community organizations and neighborhood affiliations. With social capital, communities thrive; without it, they falter. So just why is our nation’s stock of social capital diminishing? Indeed, some have argued that there is, in fact, no loss of social capital at all. Rather, people amply associate with one another in different ways. Instead of bowling leagues, they create the informal networks required for social capital by engaging one another on the internet. In other words, the argument goes, we don’t need strong communities of place if we have strong communities of interest.
• Centers: The mixed-use destinations of a group of neighborhoods; they include jobs and housing as well as services and significant retail.
• Districts: Special-use areas typically dominated by a primary land use, such as a university, cultural center or airport.
• Preserves: The open space elements of the regions, by they productive agriculture, parklands or natural habitat. In most regions, simply preserving crucial lands is not enough to contain sprawl. Preserving unbuildable areas—wetlands, riparian corridors, steep slopes, watersheds, forestlands, and endanger habitat—will rarely define a complete regional boundary.
• Corridors: The edges and connectors of the region’s centers, neighborhoods, and districts. They come in many forms, from roads and highways to rail lines and bikeways, from power-line easements to streams and rivers.
• Maps that use variations of these five simple elements can help us to reconcile and redirect planning at the regional and local levels.
• The Urban Footprint: A New Planning Tool
• These design principles, place types and regional building blocks provide a new way of thinking about community development and, effectively, a new system of planning. Putting these elements together into a self-reinforcing whole and implementing it across the county is the challenge of the next generation of designers and planners. The taxonomy of neighborhoods, centers, districts, preserves, and corridors just described will eventually replace the old land use language f single-use zones—neighborhoods replacing subdivisions, village centers replacing shopping centers, and town centers replacing office parks and malls. In doing so, mixed-use urban places will become legal again.
• Endemic to our design problems is that land use, built form, environmental regulation, street design, civil engineering, and landscape standards are isolated and controlled by independent public agencies, regulations, and approval processes. What’s more, each profession—traffic, civil engineering, planning, landscape, and architecture—has its own codes, which rarely sync with one another or to the particular qualities of place. They each operate independently of one another in silos.