How exactly do small towns become suburbs? How do country roads turn into commercial strips? And what can planners do to prevent these changes in the future? Using the state of Vermont as the rural ideal, the authors compare contemporary vs. traditional development to demonstrate how today's primary way of developing land—suburban sprawl—is forever changing the look of rural American. Using a host of aerial photographs—many altered through computer simulation to illustrate how landscapes are transformed over time—
argues for a return to traditional development patterns that produce more compact cities and towns.
Highlighting widespread trends in contemporary land development—from fragmentation (our tendency to spread out) to separation (our tendencey to allocate separate areas of town for living, working, shopping and playing)—the authors offer case examples of coummunities that have succeeded in curbing those trends. They show how these communities have invigorated their town centers; lured home buyers back to town; integrated working, shopping and recreation areas; nurtured a sense of identity and community; rewritten land-use regulations to allow for more compact developing; and overcome the "cars rule" mentality of suburban development.
Commentary of Tom Slayton for Vermont Public Radio
You would naturally think that an aerial view of Vermont would yield views of rolling mountains, blue lakes, farms and forests. But there's another view of Vermont from above, and it offers a vision, not of a natural paradise but of strip-malls and a burgeoning suburbia.
In ABOVE AND BEYOND by Julie Campoli, Elizabeth Humstone and photographer Alex MacLean, a view of Essex Junction from the air shows row upon row of cookie-cutter tract housing. A view of one approach to the attractive little village of Hardwick shows parking areas run amok--huge Morrisville and the nearby commercial section along Route 15 in Morristown makes it obvious that the malls and supermarkets now consume at least four times as much space as the traditional village down the way, which has been dwarfed by the new development.
This is a coffee-table book of photographs with a message: Vermont is being quietly suburbanized, suggests ABOVE AND BEYOND. It is happening piecemeal and on a small scale, but it is nonetheless happening, and it has the potential to change rural Vermont from a welcome haven away from mass commerce into more of the same.
The book's many aerial photos show what can't be seen from the ground--the different patterns that different forms of development make on the land. It graphically shows the difference between growth that retains the character of a place and growth that destroys it.
It is obvious that there's still a lot of Vermont left. ABOVE AND BEYOND makes note of communities such as Brandon, Montpelier, Vergennes and Barre, where traditional downtowns make errands and business easy to conduct on a human scale. But the book also shows places in Dorset where huge trophy homes are plunked right in the middle of good farmland and commercial districts in Williston and elsewhere that are surrounded by acres of pavement and accessible only by car.
""These images represent what is happening to the ordinary landscape of rural areas,"" authors Campoli and Humstone write. ""The little additions and alterations along roadways over time add up to a substantial change, but the change usually goes unnoticed until it's too late.""
Such trends can be reversed by good town and regional planning, they write.
But will Vermont retain its invaluable sense of place, its rural character? Or will it turn into another very pleasant, slightly hilly version of suburbia? It's too soon to say. But ABOVE AND BEYOND offers clear evidence that the choice is upon us and if we are able to save Vermont as we know and love it, we need to act now.
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Review from SEVEN DAYS 8 May 2002, Donald Maurice Kreis
If a picture is worth a thousand words, ABOVE AND BEYOND tells a big story about development--and the evolution of architecture in Vermont. Published this year by the American Planning Association, the book is written by Burlington-based land-use experts Julie Campoli and Elizabeth Humstone and illustrated with images mostly from aerial photographer Alex MacLean. ABOVE AND BEYOND is an atypical Vermont picture book, however, because it eschews the traditional postcard scenes and shows the inhabited parts of the Green Mountain State as they really are--ugly.
Consider the tale ""told"" by MacLean's camera a few hundred feet over Merchant's Row in Rutland. He has photographed a row of classic 19th century commercial buildings with street-level storefronts and, overhead, finely crafted brickwork, windows and cornices decorated in the charming styles of that era--Italianate, Greek Revival and French Mansard. Roughly in the middle of the block is a deliciously garish anachronism: Vermont's first ""skyscraper,"" the seven-story Service Building, opened in 1930 and outfitted in the then-futuristic Art Deco mode a la the Empire State and Chrysler buildings in New York City. Collectively, these buildings comprise a vibrant downtown streetscape.
But the story takes a turn for the worse in the next photograph. MacLean's lens has zoomed across the street to reveal a sprawling, one-story 75,000 square-foot Wal-Mart, separated from Merchants' Row by a vast, treeless parking lot. Many--including the authors of ABOVE AND BEYOND--consider it a victory that the retail giant agreed to build in downtown Rutland rather than in a Taft Corners-type of suburban park. But others plainly consider the big box a functional definition of urban blight, minus the broken windows and graffiti.
Providing a broad view, literally, of what has happened to Vermont's land over the past 50 years or so is the objective of ABOVE AND BEYOND. Since Humstone and Campoli both live in Vermont's largest metropolis, the book puzzles in some detail over the area's particular vulnerability to sprawl, though not to the exclusion of other regions. The photographs show the Green Mountain State from Bennington to St. Albans, and they are organized according to what the authors see as the major themes in the current relationship of Vermonters to the land: incremental change; urban centers and urban ""edges""; fragmentation; the lust for privacy and the resulting pre-eminence of private spaces of the public realm; the phenomenon of bigger-as-better in both residential and commercial spheres; and the effect of the automobile.
The book's emphasis on photos may earn it a place on coffee tables, but its discourse certainly will give readers something to talk about while getting caffeinated. In fact, ABOVE AND BEYOND makes great reading for New Englanders who may be weary of foliage, steeples and covered bridges. But the earnest and detailed manifesto that accompanies each photo is hardly cynical. The authors have made it their business to foster a sense of responsibility to Vermont's landscape. Humstone is executive director of the Vermont Forum on Sprawl, and Campoli is a principal in the Burlington-based landscape architecture and planning firm Terra Firma Urban Design.
Nobody comes to Vermont, either by birth or migration, with the explicit intention of ruining their surroundings, the authors acknowledge. Their pitch is to get people to notice the ""unintended"" consequences of their individual choices. As Jonathan Rauch recently pointed out in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, it's been known since the 1930s that human settlements array themselves in certain predictable mathematical patterns, to which homeowners and even developers are perfectly oblivious. This is called Zipf's Law named for the Harvard linguist who also figured out, oddly, that the frequency of words in written English assumes a similar pattern.
Essentially, Campoli, Humstone and MacLean are on a campaign to ""repeal"" Zipf's Law by getting people to see these patterns and consciously thwart them. ""There is often no clear turning point, only a slow evolution"" with regard to development, they point out, describing and illustrating how individual decisions create consequences that none of the individual actors intended. Examples: moving a factory out of downtown and near an interstate highway exit; widening commercial thoroughfares; designing a new neighborhood not as part of a village's street grid but as a self-contained enclave; building a dream home on five acres instead of a half-acre.
ABOVE AND BEYOND's compelling documentation of these unintended consequences is no mere restatement of the points made by the classics cited in its bibliography -- everything from Jane Holtz Kay's anti-automobile rant ASPHALT NATION to Jane Jacobs' fabled 1961 defense of urban street life, THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES. Anyone can write or talk about these things, it is quite another to prove them.
ABOVE AND BEYOND offers irrefutable evidence. Consider the series of photographcs showing the ""progression"" of the National Life Insurance Company in Montpelier. The company has grown through six headquarters, leaving some decent architectural heritage in its wake--including a great Richardson Romanesque building on State Street, now occupied by the Vermont Agriculture Department. Ultimately however, the insurance company settled on a bluff far beyond the city center in the isolated, fortresslike office park that is every I-80 traveler's first glimpse of Vermont's capital city.
It is not just this ""migration to the edge"" with its selfish consumption of undeveloped land that so bothers Campoli, Humstone and MacLean. They are also concerned about a collective withdrawl from the town square. ""As a nation we've become skilled at creating private space, but we've fallen short on creating spaces together,"" they argue. ""Our dwellings have grown and become more luxurious while our community spaces have shrunk.""
Successful alternatives to this trend proved difficult to find and photograph, but ABOVE AND BEYOND does include the 81-unit condominium complex at the corner of Battery and College streets in Burlington. Designed by Truex Cullins & Partners, the building features a distinctively undulating facade that adds welcome texture and variety to the downtown streetscape. Its lake views and city convenience were presumably sufficient to convince well-heeled homebuyers to forego their country-estate dreams. The authors contrast this project's downtown-revitalizing land-use choice with the paved-paradise that is Shelburne Road.
In extolling the virtue of such choices, Humstone and Campoli can be credited with consistency. Vermont has its share of hypocrites who pontificate against sprawl and then drive their SUVs to secluded homes on five-acre subdivisions of what used to be farms or forests. Campoli and Humstone live in bungalow-style homes on small plots in Burlington. Humstone walks a mile to her downtown office; Campoli walks downstairs to hers. MacLean, also a bungalow-dweller, lives in a Boston suburb on a somewhat less commendable 1.2 acre plot.
""I've been doing research in this field for 15 years, so it's pretty likely that what I have learned would rub off on how I live,"" Campoli reports in an interview. She's not optimistic about most people modifying their behavior in order to help sustain the rural landscape, however. ""Just as sprawl is a multi-faceted problem,"" she continues, ""the solution, if it comes at all, will be from a hundred different directions, and through small gestures as well as big ones.""
For example, while waiting around for something that will make cars impractical, Campoli and her colleagues suggest at least rethinking where automobiles are stored. ""Cars can be tucked under and behind buildings,"" they point out. They credit San Francisco and architect David Soloman with having figured out how to do so.
However the authors of ABOVE AND BEYOND appear to have little hope that architecture will become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. They applaud Wal-Mart for building in downtown Rutland rather than the outskirts, but fail to propose a world in which such blocky monoliths are no longer built.
With regard to housing, the authors point out that ""high-quality design can make higher-density units attractive,"" but their proffered idea of such a design is a pseudo-Victorian development on lots--admittedly compact--in Stowe. A similar architecture of false references, Seaside in Florida, was used as the backdrop for the film THE TRUMAN SHOW for good reason: The effect is bland, conformist and nostalgic for a village life that never really existed.
It's been a half-century since a gig in the San Francisco suburbs inspired folksinger Malvina Reynolds to write a song--later made famous by Pete Seeger--about ""little boxes made of ticky-tacky."" ABOVE AND BEYOND erases any doubt that ticky-tacky has spread to Vermont fields and hillsides. Thus it's worth noting that Reynolds and Seeger weren't just singing about sprawl; they were also railing against conformity, lack of imagination and the bad buildings that result.
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Will Green, ASLA
Reviewed in Landscape Architecture, September 2002
Vermont conjures up images of lush forests, mountains, and picturesque towns. Some attribute the stateÆs beauty in part to its good fortune in having been spared the effects of urban renewal an uncontrollable development. Unfortunately, things in Vermont are changing. This is particularly challenging because change in the rural landscape is often incremental with ôno clear turning point, only a slow evolution. ôWith small-scale alterations occurring at a somewhat lazy pace, residents may not notice the changes until it is too late, and they are left to wonder. ôHow did this happen?ö
ABOVE AND BEYOND is written as a wake-up call for people living in Vermont and in other rural areas whose towns and villages are ôon the verge of change.ö The authors use a graphic approach to illustrate the traditional patterns of development and compare then with what is happening now and in the recent past as designs and engineered solutions accommodate our contemporary auto-dominated culture. The illustrated discussions of zoning and local regulations, transfer of development rights and farmland preservation, public policy dictates and environmental propoint for those wanting to shape their communityÆs future.
ôLook at the rural landscape from above and you will see our attitudes toward land revealed in the patterns on the ground,ö state the authors. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the more than 200 high-quality aerial photographs of stark subdivisions, over-sized culs-de-sac, isolated mills, and out ûof-place structures create value far beyond the bookÆs 200 pages. Of particular import are the contrasting images of the same locations shown at different moments in time and the contexts in which many new developments appear starkly out of place. Traditional on-ground photography would not work nearly as well. With aerial photographs taken by Alexander MacLean, and well-referenced and well-written text, ABOVE AND BEYOND provides a wealth of information for citizens, planners, officials, developers, and designers who are grappling with the complex series of issues facing rural Vermont.
ABOVE AND BEYOND is not intended as a comprehensive guide to preserving rural America; however, it does offer examples of methods and techniques used successfully by rural towns so that its readers may be able to shape future development. The book focuses on Vermont, but its relevance extends far beyond the Green Mountains to all rural areas undergoing changes associated with sprawl and suburbanization.
While the organization of the text seems somewhat arbitrary and the titles of the paragraphs headings left me looking for pattern, these minor matters failed to mar the reading of this book. Although repetition creeps into nearly every chapter, it would be hard to discuss topics with titles like Edges and Centers, Fragmentation, Separation, and Private Space, Public Realm, without considerable overlap. I would even argue that the repetition emphasizes the threats and impacts and in some ways strengthens the book.
By looking at Vermont, the authors have selected a piece of Eden that is under siege, yet the condition is not widely recognized. Rather than railing against the machine and demanding that all growth cease, the authors have carefully illustrated each of the problems and offered s few solutions. While I might have preferred a more in-depth list of options, that was not the authorsÆ intent, nor was it to provide a step-by-step approach to problem solving. The authors show considerable restraint, but for those wanting more, there are endnotes, a lengthy bibliography, and references to a host of towns and villages that would make further investigation a simple task.
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