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Planning magazine — August 1989 Repent, Ye Sinners, Repent We can save the suburbs, say the advocates of "neotraditional" town planning. Their arguments are compelling, but in their zeal they step on a few toes. By Ruth Eckdish Knack "Your master plan is a recipe for disaster," he said. "You are building yourself a really lousy place." At fault, he added, was "third-rate planning" that perpetuated the sins of the past and gave residents no opportunity to consider alternatives. Most to blame: the traffic engineers, whose only criterion is to keep cars moving. The effects, he said, are visible in the new parts of Folsom, with their "hodgepodge of highways," single-income residential enclaves, and "streets so unpleasant that no one would walk on them." The new plan, he said, continues the pattern of "pods for this and pods for that." It calls for broad setbacks and extensive off-street parking. "Is this what you want?" he asked, pointing to a slide of a vast discount store parking lot. "This is what your code will give you." The alternative, he said, is to return to the pre-1950s pattern of old Folsom, with its tree-lined street grid and on-street parking, which acts as a buffer between cars and pedestrians. Demand a new plan, he concluded, one that "illustrates the kind of town that is being made for you." If you don't, he said in effect, you're doomed to a hell of traffic congestion. Predictably, the city's planners bristled at the criticism of their general plan, which recently won a local American Planning Association award. "Many of the things Duany wants are allowed in this plan," says associate planner Loretta McMaster, citing in particular a section that allows planners to shift densities within a project. McMaster also notes that local plans in California must conform to the state's strict requirements. "What Duany is proposing as a plan is more like a set of development requirements," she says. Nor, she adds, is she convinced that Californians are willing to give up their fenced-in yards and car-centered life style. A test of sorts will come this month, when Folsom residents vote on a measure calling for cuts in the growth goals set by the new plan, which was adopted last October. But Duany also made
a convert that night. Sacramento planning consultant Stephen Jenkins, who coordinated
the update of the general plan for the city of Folsom, says he would do things
differently now. "I would deal more directly with
the issues he was talking about," he says. That could mean, for example, "minimizing
the plan's automobile orientation" by requiring neighborhood commercial
districts to be within walking distance of residential areas and scattering
meeting places throughout the community. Articles of faith Other "neotraditionalists," as they've been called, have been saying many of the same things as Duany and Plater-Zyberk, often using the same terms as they recite the litany of suburban sins. Heading that list is Euclidean zoning. Hilda Blanco, who coordinated the technical advisory committees for New Jersey's recent state planning effort, notes that strict separation of uses may have been justified when industry was growing, but now that the growth sector is services, the reason is gone. "Pod zoning" is sexist zoning, say Duany and Plater-Zyberk. By making it hard to get from here to there except by car, it turns women into chauffeurs for their children. Moreover, by encouraging single-income neighborhoods, it contributes to the economic fragmentation of American society. Mixed use is the current byword. It's touted as the answer to traffic jams. In Folsom, Duany noted that "because most of the needs of daily life can be met within a 3,000-4,000-acre, mixed-use development, very few automobile trips would ever hit the collector roads." But the mix must include housing. The lack of housing disqualifies some of the recent retail-office developments with a pedestrian orientation — New Jersey's Forrestal Village, for example — from assuming the "traditional small town" label, says Blanco. The opposite is also true. Blanco notes that the federally sponsored "new towns" of the 1960s failed because they included only housing. Another article of faith is belief in the grid. Alan Ward, a principal of Sasaki Associates in Watertown, Massachusetts, said in a Landscape Architecture forum last December that grid plans were "more democratic. There's a greater opportunity to participate in a sense of community when you have through streets." Curvilinear streets have their place when they're handled by masters like Frederick Law Olmsted, said Duany in Atlanta, but the postwar "spaghetti plans" have nothing to do with topography. Alleys are a "civilizing element," according to Duany et al. They allow garages to be entered from the rear, making streets safer for pedestrians. Cars that don't go in garages should be parked on the street, as they are in all the new plans. Pedestrian paths make life even easier for walkers. A common refrain of the neotraditionalists is that their developments will revive public life. So, for example, Richard Randolph, one of the developers of Blount Springs, a 450-acre, Duany-designed project in the hills north of Birmingham, Alabama, says "we're building a community." Duany and Plater-Zyberk draw up a "town charter" for each of their projects, and there is much rhetoric in all the publicity about "Chautauqua-type" town governments. Gurus A few names pop up repeatedly when the neotraditionalists talk about their roots. For Duany and Plater-Zyberk, the guru is European architectural theorist Leon Krier, whom they met when he came to lecture at the University of Miami. (Duany and Plater-Zyberk are both Princeton and Yale graduates who came to Florida to teach in 1974. The Cuban-born Duany was one of the three original founders of Arquitectonica, the Miami firm known for its bold modern designs. Plater-Zyberk later joined the firm as well.) Krier "converted us," says Duany. "He explained what a traditional city was about." Soon after, in fact, Duany and Plater-Zyberk left Arquitectonica to found their own firm, vowing never again to accept a high-rise commission. In Krier's view, the cities of the West have gone downhill since the Industrial Revolution and the loss of the artisan tradition. "Functional [single-use] zoning," he has written, is "by nature antiecological" and should be replaced by the type of traditional urban planning "that realizes man's basic right to reach all habitual urban functions on foot." He has promoted the inclusion of "workshop districts" for artisans in the new small town plans. Other neotraditionalists swear by Christopher Alexander, the University of California urban design professor who, in A Pattern Language, advocates a sort of participatory architecture. On the subject of security, the recognized text is Oscar Newman's Defensible Space. Some often-mentioned names are less familiar. In fact, one of the most promising byproducts of the back-to-the-old-ways movement is the attention it has focused on such figures as Elbert Peets, Raymond Unwin, and John Nolen. Read Unwin's Town Planning in Practice (1909), and you'll know more than the experts, Duany tells his audiences. Mainly, though, the influences are not people, but places: early shopping districts like Palmer Square in Princeton; the squares of Savannah; early planned communities like John Nolen's Kingsport, Tennessee, or Coral Gables — where Duany and Plater-Zyberk live. Generally, the neotraditionalists have little good to say about contemporary planners, whom they tend to dismiss as bureaucrats. The architects like Duany simply discount the nonvisual aspects of planning as being irrelevant or destructive. Even Blanco, herself a planner, says, "I don't think it's surprising that this sort of approach comes from architects because the planning community is so entrenched in Euclidean zoning." "We're blamed for everything," responds Barbara Berlin, a consultant with the Chicago firm of Camiros, and former planning director of Park Forest, Illinois. Berlin says real estate people and bankers have much more to say about the shape of suburbs than either planners or architects. Yet Mark Hinshaw, urban design director of Bellevue, Washington, says some of the criticism is justified. "Certainly there are other actors," he said after listening to Duany in Atlanta, "but to the extent that planners as a profession have pushed the separation of uses over the last 60 years, they deserve the blame. "We don't have to literally recreate the traditional small town, but we can use the principles," adds Hinshaw. Putting it into law Duany says he has become convinced that his style of new towns requires a change in our "codes," a word he uses interchangeably to refer to plans, zoning ordinances, and design guidelines for specific projects. For Seaside, Florida, he and Plater-Zyberk devised a one-page "urban standards" matrix that has since been adapted for other projects. Under seven headings — Intent; Land Use; Land Allocation; Lots, Buildings; Streets, Alleys; Parking; and Definitions — short statements describe what can and can't be done in various building type categories. The standards require that at least five percent of a project's land area be dedicated to civic lots, with one lot reserved for a day care center. Parking lots must be at the side or rear, and alleys are required. The standards dictate narrow streets: two 10-foot travel lanes, with parallel parking on one side. The corner curb radius must not exceed 25 feet — an important feature for Duany, who points out that sharper corners slow down traffic. The standards are needed, he says, because "we can no longer assume that architects know how to act urbanistically. We have to give them rules." He adds, "Our codes assume the technical incompetence (and ill will) of architects and many planners." Another one-page document functions as a building code, dictating materials, roof pitch, window types, roof overhangs; requiring porches and picket fences; and forbidding setbacks. Duany stresses that such codes don't hamper creativity. For example, the Seaside building code has allowed at least two houses to be built in a distinctly modern style. Two years ago, Duany and Plater-Zyberk were hired to design a traditional village in Bedford, New Hampshire. Their client suggested that they include a civil engineer named Rick Chellman in their week-long design charette. Chellman, who owns a surveying company in Ossipee, turned out to be a kindred spirit, and he led a small group, including the architects and the developer in writing a ''traditional neighborhood development ordinance," designed as an alternative to the planned unit development ordinance that is now a feature of most zoning codes. The first version of the TND ordinance was turned down by the Bedford planning board in 1987 when the public works director raised questions about getting fire trucks and snowplows through the narrow streets called for by the code. Later a town meeting also voted no. A revised version was approved by a town meeting in March. Last December, the newly organized Foundation for Traditional Neighborhoods issued a "national" version of the TND ordinance, which has since been presented to planning boards in a number of communities. For Chellman, its adoption is a matter of extreme importance: "I hearken back to what Andres said — that this is an ordinance to save America. I think he is correct." To avoid "circulation by Xerox," the ordinance has been copyrighted by the foundation, which was formed to spread the word. The latest version — the product of a group of six or seven people — is 24 pages long and its language far more legalistic than Duany's original one-page code. But APA researcher Tracy Burrows says it is still vague in some places and inconsistent in others. (Burrows is the author of the June Zoning News, which is on the subject of neotraditional towns.) The statement of intent is right on target," says Burrows — to deemphasize the car and make things easier for pedestrians. "But the regulations themselves don't quite live up to that." A case in point: the ordinance's "quite conventional" off-street parking requirements. Burrows notes that the revised code does not include the greenbelt requirement that has been a feature of several Duany/Plater-Zyberk projects. "The greenbelt idea is extremely controversial; maybe that's why they backed off." She also notes that the open space requirement goes down to a meager 15 percent, "close to what you would find in an ordinary subdivision." A positive social feature, she adds, is the requirement that civic lots be set aside for a day care center and community meeting hall. But Burrows is bothered by the ordinance's ban on mobile homes, which, she notes, if built to conform to architectural design standards, can be a respectable form of affordable housing. Burrows sees a bigger problem in the fact that the ordinance limits industry, even light industry, to about one percent of total land use. "That's too little for a real town," she says. More complaints from a planner's standpoint: The code's sign controls are vague, and they set no height limits. The code doesn't include the usual engineering standards for drainage, lighting, and so on (although it does specify 10-foot light standards, which many planners would find unrealistically low). Nor are there height limits for unoccupied structures, suggesting that the TND drafters were eager to encourage cupolas and quaint towers but hadn't thought about microwave antennas and too-tall water towers. In Dade County, Florida, where the ordinance is now being considered, planning director Reginald Walters says he too sees potential problems. "Here in Dade, if anyone can find a loophole, they will," says Walters. "If we aren't careful," Walters says, "we could find the TND being largely commercial and office development. When you read the ordinance, you see that it doesn't mandate that housing be provided in commercial areas — although Andres says that's intended." Before any change is made in the county zoning ordinance, the master plan must be amended in accordance with Florida's strict new laws, which require the specific mix of proposed uses to be shown on the plan map. Walters says his department has already initiated the amendment process and is beginning to work with other county departments to hammer out provisions for a traditional neighborhood development district. Ironically, he notes, it would have been fairly easy to develop a TND under the state's old planning laws. "It would have taken variances, but it could have been done," he says, citing as an example 25-year-old Miami Lakes, northwest of Miami, which also has a main street-type of town center. "I think the problem is more attitude than anything else," he says. "Andres comes down hard on planners. But even if you have provisions in your zoning codes, you still have to convince the mortgage bankers to take a risk. "I'm all for giving people incentives to walk," Walters adds. "But people are concerned about security. It's not going to be easy to get them to accept pedestrian paths behind their property. And, frankly, we're going to be butting heads with some of the public works people." Despite all that, Walters says he welcomes a chance to test out some of the TND ideas. "We're just not quite so quick to say that this is the answer to all of society's problems." Test case As Dade considers, the TND ideas are being refined in Loudoun County, Virginia, where an elaborate countywide planning effort is under way. Once considered too far away for District of Columbia commuters, the county now attracts some 100 new residents a week. At that rate, estimates the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, the current population of 87,000 will grow to 210,000 within two decades. About two-thirds of the county's residents live in the eastern half, near Dulles International Airport. In 1984, the county adopted three-acre-minimum zoning in the more rural, western section. Now it is beginning to look for ways to cluster development into towns and villages, using the principles of neotraditional town planning. The Duany/Plater-Zyberk firm is involved in the effort, but the lead player in this case is a planning firm, Robert Teska & Associates of Evanston, Illinois. Teska and lawyer Barbara Ross of the Chicago firm, Ross & Hardies, were hired by the county in 1987 to completely revise the zoning code. The revision was under way when a new board of supervisors took office in January 1988 and undertook a sweeping review of the county's development patterns. Two countywide task forces were formed and a series of workshops organized, with participation by both Teska and Duany. The workshops resulted in two Vision statements," broad descriptions of physical planning goals for urban and rural Loudoun. Coincidentally, while the task forces were working, a local developer, Joseph Alfandre, hired Duany and Plater-Zyberk to lead a design charette for a new small town, to be known as Belmont Forest. "It turned out we were singing out of the same hymnal" says county planning coordinator Richard Calderon, using the religious imagery that seems to come naturally to anyone talking about these ideas. Last fall, Duany joined Teska, Ross, and county planners in a series of work sessions aimed at producing an amendment to the comprehensive plan and subdivision and zoning ordinances to allow a new type of development: a rural village. The mechanism for forming the village would be a density transfer: Landowners could shift development now allowed on farmland and cluster it into a 100-acre village site. The surrounding land would be placed under a permanent open space easement. As envisioned at this point, each rural village would have between 150 and 400 dwelling units, with apartments above stores encouraged by density bonuses. Industry would be permitted on the periphery. Preliminary design guidelines call for a loose grid network surrounding a village green in the style of Leesburg and other historic Virginia towns. Work on the Loudoun County ordinance is expected to be finished this summer. But even without the ordinance, the county is becoming something of a testing ground for neotraditional development, with several prominent firms, including Sasaki and RTKL of Baltimore, involved. In addition to the Alfandre project, two large projects, Brambleton and the Cascades, that reflect at least some of these ideas are now on the drawing boards; the developer of both is Kettler & Scott of Vienna, Virginia. The founders "Great towns require founders, not developers," said Duany last year at a University of Michigan symposium. And many of the new small towns are the products of particularly imaginative entrepreneurs. The question is whether there are enough innovators with deep pockets to go around. Seaside, for instance, the only in-the-ground model of a new old town, is the creation of a most unusual developer named Robert Davis, a one-time social activist who inherited 80 acres on the Florida Gulf Coast from his grandfather, a Birmingham, Alabama, department store owner. As laid out by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Seaside has a grid plan, narrow streets, on-street parking, pedestrian paths, and mandatory front porches for sociability. Its small commercial area is intended eventually to include artisan workshops, as called for by Leon Krier, who has built a vacation house for himself in the town. Davis spent a year searching out old towns to use as models for his town, and he has cited as a major accomplishment that "we have managed to revive public life in late 20th-century America." Joseph Alfandre, another of Duany's "founders," calls himself a "romantic capitalist." Alfandre's father and grandfather built typical suburban subdivisions in the Washington area, and he did the same until he came across the ideas of the neotraditionalists and hired Duany for a 352-acre development in Gaithersburg, Maryland. The tricky feature of Kentlands is the attempt to integrate the shopping mall, a joint venture of Alfandre and Melvin Simon Associates. At the design charette in June 1988, the Simon people flatly refused to include a parking structure, a day care center, and apartments above the shops. Their only compromise was a shift in site plan that allows the mall to connect with the main street of the new town, enabling residents to walk to the shops. With Kentlands under way, Alfandre has plans for a similar town on 275 acres near Dulles International Airport in eastern Loudoun County. But despite the county's interest in neotraditional development, as of mid-July, the Belmont project had not yet been approved. Planning coordinator Richard Calderon says that's because more details were needed for a plan amendment. Now Alfandre expresses "extreme frustration" at the delay, which he blames on the "professional bureaucrats" who are more comfortable with traditional pod developments. "They're protecting their turf," he says. "Here I'm offering something they say they want, and look what I get." Nevertheless, Alfandre is going ahead with other new small town
projects. "I
have crossed the bridge to TND," he says. Former state planner Hilda Blanco (who now teaches at Hunter College in New York), says Montgomery Village exemplifies the type of "community of place" called for in the state plan. The 200-acre project will include apartments above shops (intended to be affordable); a hotel; and 235,000 square feet of office space. Tuschak worked with a special township committee to work out rezoning details. He's now waiting for final approval of his plans. Twenty years ago, says Tuschak, he was teaching in an inner-city school in Brooklyn when he had "a personal vision" of building new towns. That goal did not seem realistic at the time, but Tuschak did go into real estate, establishing a series of limited partnerships in the Princeton area under the name of the Colfax Companies. Then, after 18 months of meetings in which Tuschak was a major participant, the township last December approved a "village zoning" district. For the most part, Montgomery Village will follow the by-now-familiar pattern of grid, town square, and on-street parking. But Tuschak and his planner, Peter Brown of the Houston-based architecture firm, EDI, are both disciples of Christopher Alexander and that adds a twist. Alexander preaches that each new project should be seen as a step on the way to creating an ideal urban environment. As a piece of a whole, each project is part of history. To create a town that seems to have a past, Tuschak and Brown invented a "fictional history" and drew site plans of the village as it would have been in various historical epochs. The scenario, as presented in an EDI brochure, goes this way: "Once upon a time, a Dutch family settled in what is now Somerset County, New Jersey. They built a thriving farm and as the family prospered, so did the area. Other families moved nearby and businesses flourished. Over the next two centuries, the area grew to become today's Montgomery Village." Brown says some buildings will be designed to look like historic buildings converted to new uses — mansions converted to condos, for instance. Yeah but... Even when they're being put down as "bureaucrats," planners tend to agree with the ideas of the neotraditionalists, although they might not be so dogmatic about design models. But questions remain. Without an assured greenbelt, for instance, what would prevent the new small towns from sprawling just as much as the old-style subdivisions? There's also the danger of creating a hodgepodge. In the Hill Country southwest of Austin, Texas, for instance, Walter Reifslager has commissioned Duany/Plater-Zyberk designs for a 550-acre development in which a neotraditional small town has become one of several "ideal living environments." The others are Spring Hollow Farm (175 units grouped in "farmhouse clusters" — complete with farmer); New Commerce Village (residential and office combinations); and City of the Immortals (72 expensive houses on circular sites packaged as a "subdivision concept" by the Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corporation). Others worry that the new towns will be relentlessly upper class. However, Duany is convinced that more flexible zoning will produce affordable housing, mainly by interspersing townhouses and apartments with more expensive houses; requiring apartments above stores; and putting cottages (granny flats) in every yard. But will it sell? Ernest Alexander, a planning professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, sums up the skeptic's view: "People want large lots, low density, and single-use zoning. And the vast majority of mainstream developers still cater to those desires." At the University of Michigan last year, Jorge Perez, a planner and developer in South Florida, said, "It may work in Seaside, but Seaside is a resort. In Broward County, people worry most about security." A danger, too, is that mass-market builders will pick up on the small town imagery without the philosophy. Dallas architecture critic David Dillon says, "Seaside has already become a kind of architectural kit bag; developers are beginning to use the traditional town label for, basically, any project with a gazebo." Yet Duany insists there is no problem, that developers want to build traditional towns. "Don't fight them," he says. "Simply redirect what they do into the pattern you want." In fact, Duany/Plater-Zyberk don't seem to be hurting for clients. The first large-scale test of their ideas may come in Southern California, where Howard Hughes Properties, in a joint venture with Maguire Thomas Partners and JMB Realty, has plans for a "new city" on a 957-acre site just south of Marina del Rey. Drawings for courtyard residential complexes, low-rise offices, and shops with flats above were produced at a charette in June. Elsewhere, some 25 traditional town projects are on the boards, including a nonprofit housing project in Virginia (an effort to prove the skeptics wrong on the affordable housing issue) and a development geared to working artists in Maine. Both Duany and Plater-Zyberk have recently spent considerable time in England, where they're writing the codes for a town Leon Krier is designing for Prince Charles. Plater-Zyberk now heads the graduate planning program at the University of Miami, and both she and Duany consider teaching especially important. "Students no longer know what you are talking about when you talk about a street," said Duany last year. Robert Teska calls Duany a kind of Paul Revere to whom thanks is owed for waking up the populace. But Teska rightfully points out many others are laboring in the same vineyard. In northern Illinois, for instance, Phillip Bus, the planning director of Kane County, has commissioned Teska's firm to write village development guidelines for the still largely rural area. And in northern California, a group of architects led by Daniel Solomon and Peter Calthorpe is refining the "pedestrian pockets" idea, which calls for clustering housing, retail, and offices within walking distance of transit stations. On the state level, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management and the Center for Rural Massachusetts have produced recommendations for clustering new development in the Connecticut River Valley into village-type patterns. Meanwhile, Duany continues to spread the gospel, convincing even those skeptics who wonder how he can justify building on farmland at all. "It's always painful to see open fields go," he said in Folsom, "but less painful if they're replaced by something of equal value. Wonderful towns are of equal value. Sprawl is not." Ruth Knack is the senior editor of Planning. | |
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