How much urbanism is enough?

[Hazel Borys]

Great piece by Kaid Benfield this morning. The transect key for matching the individual to their most innate habitat, but what building-scale design essentials can create personal retreats from density within each transect zone? Kaid offers up several. What else?

How much urbanism is enough? | Kaid Benfield’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC

[Roland Beinert]

Woonerfs. Why does every residential street need to be a mini-highway?

And green roofs.

[Thomas J. Johnson]

I found the transect link within the article to be much more clear and concise, in describing the principle.

http://newurbannetwork.com/article/transect

“The rural-to-urban Transect is divided into six zones: core (T6), center (T5), general urban (T4), sub-urban (T3), rural (T2), and natural (T1). The remaining category, Special District, applies to parts of the built environmental with specialty uses that do not fit into neighborhoods.”

The principle of “rural to urban Transect” then is only an observation of existing human developmental patterns, not a new or revolutionary design paradigm. It is as if to say, “lets keep doing what we’re doing.” Anybody with Google Earth can clearly see these dissipating rings of density around urban centers. Somebody merely took it upon themselves to name them T1-T6… so I guess my question is; so..?

The thing I find most insulting about urban planning/design, or at least this particular flavor of it, is that it presupposes that there is some kind of illusive ideal ratio of program elements, scales and ratios just waiting to be discovered and once struck upon, utopia will bloom. This flawed logic views the built environment as a product, the inhabitants as consumers and the finished “product” as static and sterile (with building codes to ensure it stays that way). This ethos deprives people of their most basic needs in a dense urban environment; a sense of individuality and free will. All too often urban planners seek to fit everybody into neat little boxes and demographic classifications and to design communities accordingly. This is where the young people will live, this is where they will go to raise families, this is where they will go to retire and this is where they will go to die. It’s creepy and it fails to take into consideration the human need to influence our environment, to modify it as we see fit and to leave our individual mark on it.

The greatest cities got that way because they evolved, slowly, on a small scale, block by block. Individuals building homes and starting businesses. When large swaths of land are planned and dictated we run the risk of allowing a designer (corporation /govt) to impose their will on the people and in so doing, entire regions are deprived of their character and charm. Reproducing blocks of 1920’s row houses does not recreate the gestalt of that era, especially when they are adjacent to post-modern, adjacent to Victorian. The greatest risk with this design mind set is creating vast regions that are instantly out dated, slow to evolve under mounds of bureaucracy and that don’t draw “consumers”. People don’t want to live in Disney USA. They want to live in real, living, communities. 

Urban design needs to loosen up and stop trying to anticipate and solve everybody’s problems. Not only is it an impossible task but in practice it’s doomed to fail miserably. Yes, we should allocate a certain amount of open space within new developments and we should anticipate future transportation needs. We should ensure that the basic needs of a community are met and then we should step aside and let people create their own neighborhood. We should allow more flexibility in our building codes beyond 3 color choices, 3 siding choices and two roofing materials. In fact we should demand variety by incorporating numerous developers, designers and builders in projects. Diversity is what defines the city, gives it color and life. The most beautiful and moving design gestures are inspired and spontaneous. That’s what our cities need more of…    

 

[Thomas J. Johnson]

Sorry, got a little off track there… one “transect zone” that is not mentioned is the “vertical transect zone”. Shall we call it T7? If you want to escape the city, you have to go up or out… it’s a lot easier to have your own little oasis in the sky than it is to get out of town on Friday afternoon. T7 is where it’s at…

[Trace One]

Isn’t what you are describing, Thomas, as a desireable way to govern growth, the ‘form-based’ planning concept..?

 

I don’t think ‘people ‘ ever create neighborhoods, you need to at least be able to fund some construction, which already takes a little organization and intelligence..

 

I want less flexibilitly..I want to live with no damn cars, and to live with people who don’t want cars..Fire Island is  pretty high on my list, like Will Cuppy I plan to retreat there and write a history of the earth..

There apparently is a new development in Germany that has opted out of cars..Could ‘the people’, whoever they are, accomplish that?

Can “the people”, in these ‘market based’ ideas, control the population density for water availability? That is what I want the planners to do – tell us when to stop, where to not build ever (like the central valley of california)..I don’t see this happening anywhere – the whole damn country is open for business, because of the tax structure that allows a huge portion of  people to profit from construction, with the environment be damned..

Just rambling..

[mark foster]

New urbanism, in all it’s incomplete and watered down forms is still better than a cul de sac suburb–especially from the “social interaction” side of things.  The biggest problem I see with the watered down versions is the open space is not adequate–a few flat lawn areas.  Even the open space is urbanist!  No real access to the natural world except by car.

I live in Louisville KY, which is fortunate to have had forward thinking city fathers who hired Olmstead to design large parks and connecting parkways which became hubs to dense neighborhoods.  We are recreating another one on the south-east side of the county, but all too often the other “new urbanist” developments lack this “get away”space.

We are also developing some “conservation subdivisions” which are intended to address the “get away” space–but not the urban core spaces.

From a market driven side of things, I see all three of these development models doing better in this bad economy than the traditional suburbs. 

[Thomas J. Johnson]

I see people as being more interested in reclaiming valuable sections of T5, rather than new construction. Most of our major cities have under utilized neighborhoods immediately adjacent to T6. If I understand the Transects model, that is exactly what we should be doing. We should be concentrating on refining what’s already there instead of trying to instantly create a new T6 in close proximity to a well established T6. Chicago is a perfect example; the near west side and near south side have so much potential. It’s cheap, has character and is all less than 5 miles from the loop. Instead of trying to create some new model of urban urban design in a cornfield 45 minutes outside of the city, why don’t we concentrate our efforts where you can get the most bang for your buck…? There’s no need to recreate the wheel, we only need to true it up a bit, tension the spokes and re-grease the bearings,  if you will…

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