THE NEW URBANISM (from The Atlantic Monthly, September, 1996)
The principles apply equally to villages, towns, and cities. Most of them
apply
even to places of extraordinarily high density, like Manhattan, with added
provisions that I will not go into here, in part because special cases like
Manhattan
are so rare, and in part because I believe that the scale of even our
greatest cities
will necessarily have to become smaller in the future, at no loss to their
dynamism
(London and Paris are plenty dynamic, with few buildings over ten stories
high).
The pattern under discussion here has been called variously neo-traditional
planning, traditional neighborhood development, low-density urbanism,
transit-oriented development, the new urbanism, and just plain civic art.
Its
principles produce settings that resemble American towns from prior to the
Second World War.
1. The basic unit of planning is the neighborhood. A neighborhood standing
alone
is a hamlet or village. A cluster of neighborhoods becomes a town. Clusters
of a
great many neighborhoods become a city. The population of a neighborhood
can
vary depending on local conditions.
2. The neighborhood is limited in physical size, with well-defined edges
and a
focused center. The size of a neighborhood is defined as a five-minute
walking
distance (or a quarter mile) from the edge to the center and a ten-minute
walk
edge to edge. Human scale is the standard for proportions in buildings and
their
accessories. Automobiles and other wheeled vehicles are permitted, but they
do
not take precedence over human needs, including aesthetic needs. The
neighborhood contains a public-transit stop.
3. The secondary units of planning are corridors and districts. Corridors
form the
boundaries between neighborhoods, both connecting and defining them.
Corridors
can incorporate natural features like streams and canyons. They can take
the form
of parks, nature preserves, travel corridors, railroad lines, or some
combination of
these. In towns and cities a neighborhood or parts of neighborhoods can
compose
a district. Districts are made up of streets or ensembles of streets where
special
activities get preferential treatment. The French Quarter of New Orleans is
an
example of a district. It is a whole neighborhood dedicated to
entertainment, in
which housing, shops, and offices are also integral. A corridor can also be
a district
-- for instance, a major shopping avenue between adjoining neighborhoods.
4. The neighborhood is emphatically mixed-use and provides housing for
people
with different incomes. Buildings may be various in function but must be
compatible
with one another in size and in their relation to the street. The needs of
daily life are
accessible within the five-minute walk. Commerce is integrated with
residential,
business, and even manufacturing use, though not necessarily on the same
street in
a given neighborhood. Apartments are permitted over stores. Forms of
housing are
mixed, including apartments, duplex and single-family houses, accessory
apartments, and outbuildings. (Over time streets will inevitably evolve to
become
less or more desirable. But attempts to preserve property values by
mandating
minimum-square-footage requirements, outlawing rental apartments, or
formulating
other strategies to exclude lower-income residents must be avoided. Even
the best
streets in the world's best towns can accommodate people of various
incomes.)
5. Buildings are disciplined on their lots in order to define public space
successfully. The street is understood to be the pre-eminent form of public
space,
and the buildings that define it are expected to honor and embellish it.
6. The street pattern is conceived as a network in order to create the
greatest
number of alternative routes from one part of the neighborhood to another.
This
has the beneficial effect of relieving traffic congestion. The network may
be a grid.
Networks based on a grid must be modified by parks, squares, diagonals, T
intersections, rotaries, and other devices that relieve the grid's tendency
to
monotonous regularity. The streets exist in a hierarchy from broad
boulevards to
narrow lanes and alleys. In a town or a city limited-access highways may
exist only
within a corridor, preferably in the form of parkways. Cul-de-sacs are
strongly
discouraged except under extraordinary circumstances -- for example, where
rugged topography requires them.
7. Civic buildings, such as town halls, churches, schools, libraries, and
museums,
are placed on preferential building sites, such as the frontage of squares,
in
neighborhood centers, and where street vistas terminate, in order to serve
as
landmarks and reinforce their symbolic importance. Buildings define parks
and
squares, which are distributed throughout the neighborhood and
appropriately
designed for recreation, repose, periodic commercial uses, and special
events such
as political meetings, concerts, theatricals, exhibitions, and fairs.
Because streets
will differ in importance, scale, and quality, what is appropriate for a
part of town
with small houses may not be appropriate as the town's main shopping
street.
These distinctions are properly expressed by physical design.
8. In the absence of a consensus about the appropriate decoration of
buildings, an
architectural code may be devised to establish some fundamental unities of
massing, fenestration, materials, and roof pitch, within which many
variations may
function harmoniously.
Under the regime of zoning and the professional overspecialization that it
fostered,
all streets were made as wide as possible because the specialist in charge
-- the
traffic engineer -- was concerned solely with the movement of cars and
trucks. In
the process much of the traditional decor that made streets pleasant for
people
was gotten rid of. For instance, street trees were eliminated. Orderly rows
of
mature trees can improve even the most dismal street by softening hard
edges and
sunblasted bleakness. Under postwar engineering standards street trees were
deemed a hazard to motorists and chopped down in many American towns.
Kenton Bird
Department of Journalism
and Technical Communication
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523-1785
Phone: (970) 491-5986 Fax: (970) 491-2908
e-mail: KBird@vines.ColoState.edu