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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@gilanet.com>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [Livingontheland] Return of the Village - An Ecology of Community
  • Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 14:55:35 -0700



Return of the Village - An Ecology of Community
ROBERT ALTHOUSE
http://www.networkearth.org/naturalbuilding/village.html

There is a type of revolution going on in modern community design. It has
evolved over the last twenty years and it is deemed by many to be as
important as the Bauhaus architectural movement in Europe. It has been called
different names, such as the New Urbanism, Traditional Town Planning, Transit
Oriented Development (TOD) or Village Design. At the heart of this movement
lies a respect for the ecology of community.

Development since the advent of the automobile, and especially since World
War II, has increasingly isolated people and their activities, replacing the
street designed for pedestrians to move and gather, with a street dominated
by the automobile and its resultant congestion and pollution. Streets now
serve to divide us, rather than create the place where people meet and come
together in community.

The alternative to the sprawl resulting from auto-centered design is to have
neighborhoods comprised of housing, parks and schools, all within walking
distance of shops, civic services, jobs and transit. It is a modern version
of the traditional town, the planning of which, in America, reached its peak
somewhere between 1900 and 1920. After 1920, the invention of the automobile,
seen as our great problem-solver, created a new euphoria and false hope. We
realize now, in fact, that in many ways it has become our greatest problem.

Two-thirds of the air pollution in Albuquerque, New Mexico is the result of
the automobile. Where once was spectacular air, there has been an increase of
smog and 'no burn' nights. To quote Peter Calthorpe, "the pedestrian has
become the lost measure of the community." Auto-based planning has given
birth to large retail centers, based on roads jammed with cars to support
them, tending to suck cash out of the community and bring only low-paying
jobs to replace it.

The art of designing pedestrian-oriented, walkable communities with a balance
of retail, civic and residential uses has been around for a very long time.
There are excellent examples of these kinds of communities in Boston, in the
Capital Hill area in Seattle, and in Charleston, South Carolina, to name a
few. At the heart of a successful community always lies a common pride of
place created by shared public areas.

Our challenge now is to develop a regional growth strategy which integrates
social diversity, environment protection, and mass transit. This involves
creating an architecture that reinforces the public domain without
sacrificing the variety and character of individual buildings. The most
advanced planning approach is one that establishes the pedestrian in a
mixed-use, livable community; it is a design philosophy that is capable of
accommodating modern institutions without sacrificing human scale, memorable
places, and the resultant quality of life.

Costs of Automobile-Centered Planning

Demographics are changing more than ever, and the patterns of sprawl do not
support them in a healthy way. Married couples with children now represent
only 26% of the households, down from 40% a generation ago.

Fewer and fewer families are able to afford a first car, let alone a second.
We must redesign our communities so that we can have a quality of life that
is not held hostage by the automobile. Our nation's sprawl-generated
transportation system uses up 69% of the nation's oil, half of which is now
imported. A person living in El Dorado (30 miles from Santa Fe) and commuting
to work spends over two full weeks per year locked inside their automobile.
At $12 per hour, just under $4,000 worth of wages are lost per year, merely
in time spent behind a steering wheel. In addition, the average automobile
costs just under $4,000 per year when all associated expenses, including
maintenance and fuel are factored in. These are personal costs. The
environmental costs are staggering as well. The average automobile puts out
its own weight in carbon dioxide and other pollutants per year.

There are also hidden impacts, such as storm drains and parking lots which
divert water from sinking into the land and concentrate powerful eroding
outflows of pollution. Our urban areas are getting hotter because of
increased pavement areas. Temperatures in Los Angeles have increased seven
degrees in forty years. Flood dangers have increased because of erosion.
Complex ecosystems are being destroyed, especially our riparian zones.
Massive parking lots are causing buildings to overheat, increasing the burden
for more electricity and air conditioning, thus creating more pollution.

Choosing Alternative Transportation

It has been proven that older, tree-shaded towns are typically ten degrees
cooler in the summer than new, treeless suburbs. The creation of friendly,
tranquil, tree-lined streets is an important factor in seducing people to
choose pedestrian and bike transportation over the automobile. In the dry
Southwest, one way to grow street trees without wasting water is to put
street runoff into a series of French drains or swale depressions every 50
feet along the street. Drought resistant trees are planted near them. These
trees are then irrigated by natural runoff, rates of flooding and erosion are
reduced, ground water infiltration is increased, and the runoff has a chance
to be pre-treated by bacterial action in the soil, reducing ground-water
pollution.

A pollution study by Rutgers University comparing compact development to
sprawl found that 1.38 billion dollars could be saved in roads,
infrastructure and school construction in New Jersey over the next 20 years
by moving sprawl into pedestrian scale, small village centers. It also found
that auto use and air pollution would be significantly reduced and that
30,000 acres of farmland and urban space could be saved.

A rule of thumb is that about 10 housing units per net acre (after the land
for streets and public spaces has been subtracted) is the order of density
required to support public transportation. It is often near-sighted no-growth
advocates who block transit-oriented development in the name of
environmentalism. The unintended result is often that the pressure of
development continues, reappearing farther out from urban centers as sprawl,
creating a much more devastating impact on our local ecology and quality of
life.

Additionally, we must reverse the trend of segregated zoning which was
championed even by the genius Frank Lloyd Wright in the early days of the
automobile-based euphoria. Future development needs to be guided by these
three general principles from Peter Calthorpe:

1. The regional structure of growth should be guided by more compact village
and neighborhood forms and the expansion of mass transit.

2. The segregated, single-use zoning practices should be replaced with
standards that create mixed-use walking neighborhoods, and respect for
corridors of open space.

3. Community design policies should create an architecture oriented toward
celebrating the public domain and human dimension, rather than the private
domain and the scale of the automobile.

Creating People-friendly Streets

The necessity of the automobile in our lives discriminates especially against
the elderly, the poor, and kids. People are alienated in communities of
"McMansions," as Duany calls them. In a traditionally planned community, it
is possible to move down quiet streets with a gentler traffic flow dissipated
by many varied and direct routes to reach civic, retail and work
destinations. Travel happens on friendlier streets which make foot and bike
travel a real alternative.

In a typical transit-oriented neighborhood, key civic, retail and employment
areas are placed within a 2000 foot or 6-minute walking distance from 400 to
1000 residences. No residence is ever more than two blocks from a park.

Once there are neighborhoods designed to be within an easy walk or bike of
public transit, each of these neighborhood centers can then become a stop
along transit lines linking the complete region, creating a choice for people
other than complete dependency on the costly automobile. This also enhances
the opportunity to have threads of greenbelts between the communities which
can become wildlife corridors.

Several forward-thinking regions of the country have now adopted this style
of development as a key element in their development codes. Leading the way
are San Diego, Portland, Sacramento and Toronto.

In summary, I quote from Peter Calthorpe a list of Transit-Oriented
Development principles:

1. Organize growth on a regional level to be compact and transit supportive.

2. Place commercial, housing, jobs, parks and civic uses within walking
distance of transit stops.

3. Create pedestrian friendly street networks which directly connect local
destinations.

4. Provide a mix of housing types, densities and costs e.g. an affordable
"granny flat" over the garage means service workers don't have to drive long
distances.

5. Preserve sensitive habitats, riparian zones and high quality open space.

6. Make public spaces the focus of building orientation and neighborhood
activity.

7. Encourage infill and redevelopment along transit corridors within existing
neighborhoods.

Robert Althouse has designed and built homes for twenty years using solar
energy, greywater systems, composting toilets and alternative bio-benign
material systems. He founded the Eco-Logical Design Group which specializes
in sustainable community planning and community design and is currently
working on "The Frijoles Village," a 500-home mixed-use, mixed-income
pedestrian-oriented village located near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
althouse@nets.com




  • [Livingontheland] Return of the Village - An Ecology of Community, Tradingpost, 03/28/2004

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