| TMP Collection:
Codes: Charleston, SC
The Future of Civic Life:
New Rules Concerning Urban Design could make Sprawl a Thing of the Past |
 “…’The whole point of the new zoning concept is to make it easy for developers to build the kind of neighborhoods that our citizens have said they want,’…” Tim Keane, Charleston City Planning
Feeling lonely and isolated?
Does facing rush hour traffic every day leave you feeling stressed out and irritable?
Are you getting a little bored with your digital cable, home theater, DVD player and Play Station?
Did you recently discover that the exotic beauty you have been courting online all these months is actually a pot-bellied retired trucker from Cleveland named Frank?
If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, you may need Prozac. On the other hand, you might just need a new zoning code.
Charleston City Council is poised to take an historic step this week when it votes on changes to the City’s zoning ordinance. If the new ordinance passes, Charleston will be on the road to reforming the land-use practices that have shaped the local landscape for the last fifty years. The new ordinance would allow the creation of dense, multi-use, pedestrian-oriented villages at strategic sites throughout the city. The new zoning plan’s backers hope that these villages will help reduce traffic, conserve rural land and create focal points for community life in the city’s more suburban neighborhoods.
Many issues that have come before the City Council are more highly publicized and contentious. The ban on smoking in public places that will be up for a vote at the same meeting seems to have stirred far more emotion. Yet few matters the City Council will consider this year have the potential to so radically affect our civic destiny. The future of the city is a stake. Whether Charleston will be a small island of historic buildings in a vast sea of sprawl or whether we can build new neighborhoods as gracious as our older areas hinges on the fate of the gathering place initiative.
The “gathering places” proposal, as it is sometimes known, would create two new optional zoning districts: a “new neighborhoods” district for previously undeveloped sites and a “gathering place” district at redevelopment sites. In terms of the kind of environments they are designed to achieve, the new districts are hardly distinguishable.
For the sake of convenience I will refer to both as “gathering places,” a term first suggested by a citizen at a public planning workshop. After weighing some decidedly unsexy alternatives like “urban nodes,” the gathering places name stuck. It has a warm nostalgic ring obviously calculated to appear friendly and unthreatening to a public prone to panic at the first mention of words like “urban” or “density.” However, gathering places has the virtue of describing how advocates hope these areas will function in two straightforward words that everyone can understand.
The Planning Commission voted overwhelmingly to recommend adoption of the new districts at its May 21st meeting. But the enthusiasm was not unanimous. Commission member Barbara Ellison echoes the comments she made when she cast the lone dissenting vote at that meeting: “Gathering Places is a frothy, feel good term. I think it sounds vague and nostalgic because it is. The fact is that most people depend on their cars, and it’s going to be hard to change that. I don’t believe most people really need more places to gather. Most people are too busy with their jobs, their families and homes to have the time to gather much anymore. People spend more of the free time they do have watching television and surfing on the internet.”
“If you build it, they may not come.” she suggested ominously.
Charleston City Planning Director Tim Keane is much more optimistic. On the night of the Planning Commission meeting, he beamed with satisfaction. The plan his office had spent years developing was finally on its way to City Council. “From a planning perspective, this is as big as it gets,” he said. He predicted that if passed, the gathering places would become a central focus of the city’s planning and economic development agenda for at least the next decade.
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