The model of land development practiced today will surely be the scavenged ruins of tomorrow. Peak oil will guarantee this outcome…
Most people connected to the business of urban development like I am understand that decisions and action is driven by the availability of money, the developers that employ the money and turn a hefty profit, and the landowners that seek to maximize their return also. The lucrative nature of the business for practitioners who follow the formula (i.e. what has always worked thus strip shopping malls and cul-de-sac subdivisions in the exurbs) continues to drive sprawl and an enormous waste of land and resources clearly diametrically opposite to actions that should be taken to relocalize and become more resilient. What this amounts to is a criminal waste of dwindling precious resources at a time when we need to swiftly retool our communities in the face of peak oil and climate change.
Municipalities often encourage this form of templated development in order to maximize tax ratables, adequately fund local services (so they think), and provide jobs and other business opportunities for voters and associates. Thus the pattern continues and the core is emptied out. Downtown is diminished by disinvestment in favor of sinking public money into the inefficient infrastructure of the suburban moonscape. Businesses downtown can’t compete anymore with big box stores with square miles of parking and limitless selection. Residents move out as their shopping and jobs are relocated in the great beyond. It’s a familiar story and repeated hundreds and thousands of times across the American and Canadian landscapes and becoming popular in other developed and developing countries.
Back in the 1980’s, an obscure Miami architectural firm called DPZ came along, and due to an extent to the magnetic personality and the brilliant and compelling story told by one if its principal’s, Andres Duany, a new phenomenon exploded upon the American homebuilding market which at the time was labeled neo-traditional development. You likely are familiar with their work ranging from Seaside and Celebration in Florida to Kentlands in Maryland and many other new communities largely built in the suburbs. More than twenty years later this firm is renoun as the leading intellectual and market force in a movement of neo-traditional development called New Urbanism. New Urbanism is now creeping into urban neighborhoods and focusing on abandoned strip shopping centers built in the 50’s and 60’s as practitioners understand that redevelopment of the soulless garbage that was built after World War II is even more important than building the correct way in the suburbs, which in itself is at least better than the standard model up to that point in time.
Yet the work of developers using the New Urbanist model wherever they are building is a drop in the bucket, a grain of sand on the beach compared with the volume of residential and commercial development that was being built right up to the booming crash that was the mortgage market meltdown. Reasons for this have been discussed over the years by planners, urban designers, and architects and they range from developers not willing to change their business model, banks not willing to lend on an untried product in their market, potential customers not willing to live closer together or giving up their acre or more of fertilized fescue. Of course the meltdown has offered a nearly unprecedented opportunity to take stock of the mistakes we’ve made and scramble to adjust our model for a future where energy and other industrial commodities are much scarcer, the impacts of global climate change is fully revealed, and the economic landscape post-meltdown is more comprehensible if not better. A later post must be reserved to discuss why the economic meltdown will likely result in a more localized economy. For now, let’s just focus on land use and development.
This development hiatus is a golden opportunity to reorient, and most communities will not take advantage of it. Furthermore, state, provincial, and federal governments will not offer many viable carrots and sticks to encourage locals to do business much differently than they’ve been doing for decades. That is to say, urban sprawl based on a growth model. Of course, the entire culture not only encourages and facilitates this model, its interconnected social and financial layers require this response and offer no reasonable way to extricate onesself from it. This is where change must emerge at the local level to begin to take back control over development.
While a sustainable model of local development and land use is a must and a few progressive communities on the west coast are taking some steps in that direction, most American and Canadian municipalities can’t even debate certain terms like sustainability, climate change, peak oil, or ecosystem. These are the unfortunate facts. Speaking these words will label you a kook, nut, or liberal. At best, you will receive views askance and not be asked back. So then how do we begin the difficult task of re-defining the model of urban development? One way would be to focus on finances and nostalgia, two nearly iron clad ways to tug at the heart strings and appeal to the logic of a very conservative base. Most local citizens and public officials in these heartland cities and towns have already long abandoned the town center model of development now favored by new urbanists as too crowded and archaic. These towns and their populaces are now fully hooked on the drugs of convenient front parking, big box variety and affordability, big and visible signage, large lot residential, multiple garage bays, and cul-de-sac solitude. They favor the gated community over a heterogeneous traditional neighborhood allowing local spending for public services to dwindle since they don’t need the traditional level of public safety, sanitation, or recreation that is pre-packaged in their private realm. Why pay for premium and subsidize the common citizen who still uses public resources? Why approve the school override when your children attend the private prep school? And of course the prophesy is self-fulfilled as the abandoned town centers become crime infested and the inner neighborhoods decay and become what we now witness in Flint, Cleveland, Detroit, Youngstown and other hollowing industrial cities that are contracting and frankly dying under this cultural paradigm.
Yet even these hardened curmudgeons perceive that there is something missing from their lives as they navigate between suburban office complexes, their gated communities, and their climate controlled McMansions. What’s missing is the sense of community and public spirit traditionally a large part of the small towns and old neighborhoods of yesteryear. Up until World War II, most communities developed according to a model of interconnected streets, small lots with homes build close to the sidewalk, and front porches oriented to the street to facilitate and encourage social interaction between neighbors, pedestrians, and home occupants. To be a pedestrian in this environment is a noble thing and contributed to the spirit of living and socializing. The pedestrian in a contemporary development is converging on the forlorn version so presciently written about by Ray Bradbury in his short story The Pedestrian or notable and eerily clairvoyant novel Fahrenheit 451.
In traditional communities, blocks were short and navigable, retail and services in compatible and attractive corner stores within easy walking distance, and other destinations like schools and libraries easily walkable as well. Critics suggest that this model is outdated and no longer desired. Yet research suggests that most people when offered the option will choose the new urbanist model. This explains the wild popularity of communities like Celebration and Kentlands and visits to theme parks with Main Streets and Frontiertowns. People are longing for a simpler, more community-oriented way of life but in most cases do not realize that is can be available again if only the majority of developers would build it, if municipalities would allow it in the zoning, if bankers would lend money to fund it, and if engineers and public safety officials would find acceptable infrastructure models to re-adapt to it. The examples are out there and should be aggressively distributed and posted for any community to use as a model. The use of form-based zoning codes championed by the Congress for New Urbanism offers a ready means to shape urban design in this manner.
But that’s not enough. The current sprawl model should not be allowed anymore and the neo-traditional model should be required. There should be no choice in the matter. There are fiscal, social, environmental, energy, safety, and psychological arguments favoring the neo-traditional model. The old model contributes to waste in every sense of the word and cannot be sustained. Any building or development utilizing the sprawl model is a bad investment both individually and for the community. Short-term investment timelines still in vogue may offer gains as before but any longer-term investors will be left holding the bag and local governments will go broke extending and maintaining the infrastructure.
Obviously speaking of mandates and facilitating them are quite different. But as long as development provides a financial return equivalent or better to the existing model, mandating new urbanism can be defended constitutionally. And research has shown that new urbanism and open space design development (see Randall Arendt’s practical book Conservation Design for Subdivisions) is often far more profitable that the Post World War II sprawl model, particularly if done well. Communities that proactively implement these development requirements will be well-positioned for the future. They will be in greater demand for housing and commerce, they will hold their value and maintain a sense of relevance longer, they will encourage citizens to be healthier physically and psychologically, and they are more efficient and affordable for the municipality and private entities also.
But cities and towns need to urgently begin the process of taking control of their own destinies. For too long private interests have dictated how and where development occurs. They lay out the streets according to what sells houses rather than optimizing traffic movement options, they favor the car over the pedestrian, they facilitate building placement that favors privacy while minimizing socialization, and they segregate uses to force the use of private cars for every trip (and which does not pay to provide transit of any kind). By more rigorous regulation of development and the provision of suitable serving infrastructure (referred to as placemaking), communities can prepare for a challenging future, enhance competitiveness in regard to the variables of living that will be of greatest import, maximize fiscal responsibility in the provision of public services, and create communities that will offer an environment that people find rewarding and fulfilling, enabling social capital to be accumulated and bonds to be formed.
Instead of the broccoli branched cul-de-sac pods developed off of eight lane wide major arterials, municipalities should proactively complete the grid of streets in their town centers, forming interconnections to facilitate optimum vehicular circulation and fabricating a complete pedestrian network. Towns and cities may even consider the creation of alleys mid-block to that parking can be shunted to rear yards leaving room for more front porch space. By doing this, a densification can occur that will provide critical mass to pedestrian scales and viable town center residential neighborhoods where currently they do not exist or are tenuous.
In conclusion, it is not tedious or trite to reaffirm the critical need to actively and rapidly change the way we do the business of development. Communities that do not become more town-center oriented and densified will become redundant and infeasible. The car will almost certainly not be the primary form of transportation unless a miracle of technology occurs. Rapid adaptation to the realities of the near future must occur at many scales: individual, household, and community. Pouring money into the existing sinking ship is irresponsible madness, even if the reality of needing to make short-term cash is acknowledged. The models for our future are on the ground, out there for all to view and take back home and implement. New England, upstate New York, Annapolis, Arlington, Savannah, New Orleans all offer a living laboratory of laudable and time-tested examples of compact, dense urban form. Miami Architect Andres Duany notes, “In [the traditional New England town], one can live above the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store or nowhere near the store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In conventional suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything.“
James Howard Kunstler, in The Long Emergency remarks that, “American life in the twenty-first century has the best chance of adjusting to the Long Emergency in a physical pattern of small towns surrounded by productive farmland.” He observes that many of these are in New England and upstate New York. But even communities in these regions don’t fully appreciate what they have and continue to expand like there’s no tomorrow. Problem is, their actions assure us that there won’t be.
