Category: Andres Duany

A planning and ‘public input’ dilemma

Is it just me, or have others also been spotting an increasing trickle of  articles that might be viewed as anti-planning. Consider this one: “The false hope of comprehensive planning,” from Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., on the Planetizen.com website.

Lewyn uses the Jacksonville comprehensive plan to point out that a city plan can be a sprawl-promoter or a sprawl-fighter. The devil is in the details. Just having a comprehensive plan for your city doesn’t mean your city will necessarily grow in a prudent way. This has been one of my concerns about Charlotte and much of this metro region. The city’s plans say all kinds of wonderful things, but the underlying zoning ordinances allow much that the plans don’t call for – examples being the very suburban-style, highway-oriented retail development along North Tryon Street, which has been a designated light rail corridor since 1998.

But how can planners even hope to do a good job of listening to their communities AND promoting sensible provisions for growth, when apparently the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to see ANY development?

Andres Duany, the visionary architect and planner who was instrumental in founding New Urbanism and in changing the way many professionals write zoning codes and transportation plans, has been pooh-poohing the idea of too much public involvement, especially when the NIMBYs carry too much weight (not traditionally a problem in development-happy Charlotte, let me add). In this piece in January’s Architect magazine he discusses the relative merits of top-down planning (more efficient) and bottom-up planning (involves people but takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Here is a counterpoint from Della Rucker, in NewGeography, who still trusts the public to know what’s best in the end.
 But what if the public really doesn’t want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don’t want new development in their community. The anti-development sentiment is the highest in six years of Saint Index surveys.

So if you try to involve the community and listen to what they want, do you end up with a plan that forbids growth? How smart is that? Should planners heed community wishes, even if they know what the community wants is impossible or imprudent?  If the community wants cul-de-sacs and single-family subdivisions and no retail near where they live and also hates traffic congestion (the inevitable result of spread-out development that requires you to drive everywhere, and of cul-de-sac street patterns that funnel everyone onto a few arterials), what’s a planner to do?

Duany used to say that people hate growth because for the past 50 years it’s mostly been soul-searingly ugly and has, indeed, made life more unpleasant for the neighbors. I think he’s onto something. When people today imagine “development” the image they have is  big-box strip centers, single-family subdivisions, grassy and boring office parks or apartment complexes scattered around a site like dead earthworms. No wonder they’re NIMBYs.

The challenge for planners, it seems, is first to educate people on the repercussions of their choices and then, to show them choices for other ways to develop: tree-lined urban streets, with shops and shop windows on the sidewalks, to choose one example. But the planners can’t stop there. Step Three has to be to make sure the supporting ordinances and standards require the good and disallow the bad. Without Step Three, too many plans will, as Lewyn points out, produce development that pleases neither the planners nor the NIMBYs. 

An urbanist’s gift-book list

Planetizen.com has released its annual list of the Top 10 urban planning books. Take a look.
I haven’t yet read and thus can’t in all honesty recommend any of them but one – “What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs,” a collection of essays by well-known urban writers looking at cities and the issues cities face. The idea was to put into practice Jacobs’ technique of looking at the real world and how it functions instead of letting your view be clouded by insisting on applying theories, whether of planning of economics, regardless of whether the facts showed something different.

Mary Rowe’s piece on getting to know Jacobs, who died in 2006 in her adopted home of Toronto, is filled with warmth and close-eyed observation.

Roberta Brandes Gratz writes, in vigorous prose, about the crucial importance to “green” building of preserving buildings instead of demolishing. Ans she quotes one of my favorite passages from Jacobs’ masterwork, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” about how creative entrepreneurs and new business start-ups must have the inexpensive space that new buildings simply can’t offer:

“Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent and expensive state of rehabilitation – although these make fine ingredients – but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings. … Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.”


I haven’t finished the book; it’s a good one to dip into when you need an urban-writing fix.

If you missed it, here’s the 2010 Planetizen book list. I can recommend Anthony Flint’s “Wrestling with Moses” as an exceptionally readable history/biography of New York’s parks/highways/everything czar (and you thought Obama’s czars had too much power?), and Jacobs and their struggles to shape New York. In addition, “The Smart Growth Manual” by Andres Duany and Jeff Speck is a readable little handbook with simple prescriptions, such as “Design public places around existing trees,” and ” Designate civic sites in each neighborhood.” Under the heading, “Price parking according to its value,” is this: “Of course there is never enough parking. If pizza were free, would there ever be enough pizza?”

The anti-government Smart Growther

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

9:45 a.m. – Andres Duany, founder of Duany Plate-Zyberk and one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement, is proving that Smart Growth and “New Urbanist” are not synonymous with “bog-government liberal.” He’s talking about rebuilding New Orleans:
“The government has made affordable housing impossible, so that only government can deliver it.”
In America, he says, “We did three centuries of housing immigrants without a nickel. Then government busted in.” His point is that building standards, adopted with the best of motives, make it impossible to build the rudimentary housing that can serve as places for people without much money to live in.

And more on the problems in the U.S. planning process:
“We dumbed it down too much.” And we make decisions at the wrong level. Decisions that should have been made at the block level are made citywide – example: Chickens. “Chickens are so in.” Cities outlaw chickens citywide. That’s a decision that should depend on the different situations in different parts of town. But bike paths will be defeated if you make the decisions at the neighborhood level – people will always protest bike paths and greenways, Duany notes. That’s a decision that should be made at the regional level, because those amenities are important to the overall community.

Reinventing the City – Numbing the NIMBYs?

Here at “The Reinvented City” conference in Cambridge, Mass. First up, the always provocative Andres Duany, “a rock star of New Urbanism,” in the words of Anthony Flint of the sponsoring think tank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Other sponsors: Nieman Foundation, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design).

9:15 a.m. – Duany – “For me the century started in 2007-2008. The pivotal events all occurred about 2008.” They were the bursting of real estate bubble, the public recognition of global warming, and the erasure of public confidence in government.

And he’s got a great riff going about the problem of the public process in planning. “There’s something radically wrong with the public process” in planning. “We dumbed it down too much.” And he says, the immediate neighbors are a special interest. Currently the immediate neighbors carry extra weight. But, he notes, “they are not the community as a whole.” They will block things that are in the larger interest – bike paths, schools, power lines for new alternative energy projects, etc.

“Large shopping malls are perfectly located to be future town centers. “

And for those who think New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates are always pro-government. New Urbanist guru Duany is ow trashing government standards. His firm was trying to design a flood-proof house, which could be flooded and not be damaged. “And then we ran into government.”

Re New Orleans: It’s a Caribbean culture. “The Caribbean culture is not about the accumulation of wealth. It’s about the accumulation of leisure.” You can’t have leisure if you’re in debt. People lived in houses granddaddy owned, so there wasn’t much debt. “All the do-goody people are actually destroying the culture of New Orleans by eliminating leisure. And by raising the housing standards.”

‘Agriculture is the new golf’

The latest career advice, I hear, isn’t “plastics.” It’s “agriburbia.”

A developer-land planner-type pulled me aside this week to talk about his newest project: A development, in the general vicinity of Kannapolis-Salisbury, that they’re dubbing “agriburbia.” It’s a residential development but instead of common open space and big lawns, they’ll have a civic farm, land leased to a farmer. There will be do-it-yourself options for backyard gardeners. They’ll market it, he said, to people affiliated with the N.C. Research Campus in Kannapolis – the health-and-wellness related research operation.

The term “agriburbia,” he said, was coined by a guy in Colorado. Sure enough, here’s the Web site. “Agriburbia” is even trademarked. But it’s such a great word it may have a life of its own, like “locavore.” Its slogan: “Growing Sustainable Communities by the Bushel!” Its goal: “the re-integration of food production directly within the living environment … by focusing on agriculture as the centerpiece of both new and existing communities.”

This dovetails with a talk in Charlotte last fall by New Urbanism godfather Andres Duany, about what he termed “agricultural urbanism.” It was Duany who quipped “agriculture is the new golf.” By that, he meant an activity and marketing point for developments.

“Only 17 percent of people living in golf course communities play golf more than once a year,” Duany said. “Why not grow food? By the way, food is very good-looking.” (I wonder if Duany, an urbane Miamian, has ever seen fading tomato plants at the end of a hot, aphid-ridden summer, or squash plants wilting from vine borer assaults. But I digress.)

Duany suggested the $40 billion that Americans spend on lawn care might be better diverted to food production. And this may be the biggest eyebrow-raiser, coming from a devoted urbanist devoted it to agriculture: “The large lot (as in large-lot suburbia) can be justified primarily as the making of food.” When Duany is trying to justify large-lot suburbia, you know the world is changing.

Being Andres Duany, he even came up with a “transect” (translation: context-appropriate designs) for agriculture in a range of conditions from rural (your basic farms, with farming village clusters) to center city (container gardens on terraces and rooftops). His transect has specific allowances for how many chickens are allowed – though no cluckers in the most dense urban neighborhoods. If memory serves, you can’t have a rooster unless you’re in one of the more rural zones in his transect. Whatever.

The local developers said they’ll be going public in a few weeks. Theirs isn’t “agricultural urbanism,” they said, but suburbia with farms instead of big lawns. Stay tuned.

Traffic congestion: ‘The condition of the city’

One of the most influential human beings in the world of architecture, planning, development, city growth and urban design is in town this week for a transportation conference. Andres Duany (ranked No. 5 on Builder magazine’s list of the most powerful people in the planning industry) is giving a public talk this Wednesday 5:30-7 p.m. at the Levine Museum uptown.

Then he’ll attend a three-day transportation summit conference by the Congress for the New Urbanism. Yep, Charlotte will be fairly crawling with New Urbanists. Here’s a link for more about Duany, if you’re not familiar with him and his work. Here’s a link to information on the conference. (Correction: It’s Congress, not conference, for the New Urbanism. Too much typing fast. My apologies.)

In a nutshell, Andres and his wife and business partner, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, helped found the whole New Urbanist movement.

You’ll hear a lot of different definitions of New Urbanism, especially from developers and/or rival architects, many of whom paint it as a movement seeking only nostalgic houses with front porches. That’s a simplistic look at a complex set of ideas.

In a nutshell, New Urbanism seeks to model new development on the successful, human-friendly designs of decades past.

I’ve heard Duany lecture over the years, and among the ideas that has stuck with me is this: When re grappling with the problem of traffic congestion, he said, remember: “Congestion is the condition of the city.” Whether it’s flocks of goats, ox-drawn carts, people on foot, people on horseback, carriages, cars, SUVs, buses, Jetson-style flying saucers, whatever. Cities are crowded places, and they are going to be congested.

What matters is whether people can get around in a multitude of ways: by car, on foot, bicycle, train, streetcar, bus — the whole panoply of transportation options.

Love his ideas or hate them, Duany is always provocative, always an incisive observer of American (and world) societies.