| Sunday morning session #1:
Final discussion, outcomes, and resolution |
Transcript of presentation toCouncil IV, (independently published), Santa Fe, NM
Report and recording by Paul Crawford, Gianni Longo, Ellen Greenberg
Transcription by Jason Miller
October 20, 2002
[View the pdf]
“…So it’s incredibly important, if we want to collectively move forward with any sort of legislative agenda at the state levels, that the municipalities understand the benefits of changing the law to allow them to do more things…” – Paul Crawford
[BEGIN TRANSCRIPTION]
Ellen Greenberg:
—making the conversation run. So we have until 12:00, when yoga starts, and what Paul and I are going to suggest is that we take the time until 10:00 to finish up any unsaid things from the past two days; because we had to cut our conversations short so many times, we thought there were probably still questions or comments, or information that people want to share, and any unfinished conversations we can try to spend a little more time on until 10:00.
And then, at that time, and maybe even during the first 45 minutes, we’d like to kind of shift the tenor of our conversation. I had a talk with Chip in the evening yesterday, on the train or at dinner; we were saying that we’ve done really well for two days, kind of exchanging ideas, but we haven’t so far, been in a developmental or a progressive mode, in terms of advancing our collective thinking toward outcome or product. And I know that Stefanos, when he helped to conceptualize what we would do at this meeting, very much had the idea that we would have an outcome and it might be simply a statement of further work that needs to be done, it might be a statement of a direction that CNU should take, or it might be something more substantive.
So I’m going to ask everybody if you can try to shift your own thinking and your own self-discipline, in terms of your contributions, from that exchange that we’ve been doing really well for a few days, into more of a “let’s move together and make a progression of our ideas and our efforts.”
So to that end, at 10:00, when we finish our “finishing,” we thought we’d take a few minutes—a short time—to decide together what we want to do for the following two hours, and that, from a number of conversations that we’ve been able to have, it seems like we might actually do a piece of work here together, today, maybe something like a set of principles, a set of priorities, but really articulate some outcome of the weekend. Or, it might be that we need to spend the time talking about what our future agenda is, working through a question like the need for models or standards, or the difference between models and standards, and what our collective priorities would be.
So that’s an open question that we’ll spend a little time on at 10:00, with your consent and participation, and then take it from there and spend the next two hours on whatever task we decide to set out for ourselves.
Paul Crawford:
So the first order on the agenda is: What questions needed to be asked that weren’t asked in any of the sessions? And was there anything that needed to be said that wasn’t said? We’re fishing for markers.
Greenberg:
And we have this, for our recording opportunity, so if anyone has any better or more expressive markers available, that would be helpful.
Crawford:
Bob.
Bob Odland:
I’ve been involved in this codes—for better or worse—for about 30 years, some of which I’m proud of and some of which I’m not proud of. I’d like to step back for a minute. First of all, I commend you for doing this. But I think that having a code project is too narrowly focused. I think we’re talking about the land planning and development process. Having a code project kind of assumes that there’s a disconnect between planning and regulation, which I think is one of the big problems that we have in the United States.
Second, I would like to say that I think there’s a fundamental difference between regulating—and I’m not talking about principles, I’m talking about process—built-up areas, for example. Developing a code for an existing downtown is very much different from having to deal with 80 acres of undeveloped land. It’s a very different regulatory framework, and I think we should recognize that. Again, I think one of the problems of American regulation is that it tries to have one solution fit both of those, and it doesn’t work very well.
Crawford:
Other comments on other topics, or follow-up to that? Patrick.
Patrick Siegman:
Thanks. One thing that has been coming to mind for me is that we’ve all had the experience of going to a town, and having them say, “We only allow one house per acre.”
Sometimes they say, “It’s because we want less traffic.”
Sometimes they say, “It’s because we don’t want any of those poor people who live in apartments, in our town.”
So I think we need to do some thinking about which principles of the Charter we think ought to be achieved locally—or that we ought to try to achieve locally—and which need to be the subject of state legislation. And one thing I was thinking about is (the fact that) you go to some states, and it’s not legal to set up an entire town of one-acre lots. I was thinking that if you draw the comparison to the civil rights movement—should the civil rights marchers have attempted to achieve desegregation by holding charrettes? You know, you go to a segregated town and say, “Hey, we’ve got this great slide show about the benefits of letting poor, black people live in your neighborhood,” and I think the answer was no, it was properly a subject of state and federal changes in law that said that the doctrine of segregation was no longer an option anywhere in the country.
So maybe there are some principles of the New Urbanism that, if we really think they are fundamental principles about how people ought to live, are only achieved by state laws, because we don’t have regional government; we do have state government. And other ones are actually things that we believe really should be local options, like ‘is the height limit five stories or 50 stories?’
I think it’s worth thinking about that, and separate state law from local code.
Unknown speaker (I think it’s Ellen Greenberg, without the mic):
[Unintelligible]—expand on that, and just, like, what could a few of those things be at the state level?
Siegman:
I think the Mt. Laurel decision in New Jersey, which said that zoning is about protecting the general welfare, and the general welfare has to include housing of the type that is affordable for poor people, and therefore, apartments cannot be banned in a town. There’s an Oregon law that is very similar. I think that if you look at the British approach to parking requirements—they just said that each region must have maximum parking requirements that must be similar, because they said that, as a matter of policy for air quality benefits and a whole bunch of other things, if we agree as a society that we will all restrain car use through maximum parking requirements, we will all benefit from less traffic in the region. I don’t have a full list, but those are a couple of examples.
Joel Russell:
Following up on that, I think that one of the things that I’ve seen, and has come up a few times, and that we haven’t fully appreciated, is the differences between states as to what you can and cannot do. I don’t want to present it negatively, as limitations on what we can do, but I think there has been a series of reforms in state legislation, to encourage planning—states are at various points in the development of this, but very few have gone to the point of actually putting substantive standards in their legislation. Some of the things Patrick talked about—some of the things that Oregon and Rhode Island and Maryland—a few of the more progressive states—have actually put into their statutes. If all of the states did that, that would certainly help us all in what we’re trying to do. It would remove some of those obstacles. Whether that should be one of our priorities as an organization, I think is a whole other question, but I think it’s at least something we need to have a higher level of awareness about, both in terms of what the opportunities are to make change, and how we live with and work within a framework that limits some of our options.
Crawford:
Joel, I want to follow-up on that quickly, because there was a thought that I wanted to share at an earlier session, that I ended up not bringing up. When we were talking on the panel about some of the issues that needed to be addressed to successfully adopt a new urbanist code, a comment from the audience—I think it was Douglas Duany’s—was that we needed to be revolutionary. And in many respects, the opportunity to be revolutionary requires dealing with either state-enabling legislation or state mandates. And those get changed by two means. One is that it’s top-down, that the planning community works with staff and the governor’s office—and I’m speaking from experience in California—and amendments to the state planning and zoning law are proposed, that come down through the process to the legislature and then back to the governor for signature. Those are successful only if they are supported, in general, only by the consent of the governed, which, in that case, would be city and county governments in California. There are organizations established in California—I believe in California cities, the County Supervisors Association of California—that monitor proposals for state legislation. And if they mobilize against a proposed bill, the chances of it passing the legislature are slim; the chances of it being signed by the governor are slim.
So it’s incredibly important, if we want to collectively move forward with any sort of legislative agenda at the state levels, that the municipalities understand the benefits of changing the law to allow them to do more things. One aspect of CNU’s long-term agenda may be working with those state Leagues of Cities—there’s a National League of Cities also—to use those groups as educational fora, to teach them what form-based coding is about, and what the principles of New Urbanism mean, and what they can do for them.
Marcy McInelly:
I agree with the first person who spoke (Bob Odland), and I agree that it is really specialized to talk about codes in and of themselves; they are just a vehicle for the better communities that we’re trying to create. We’ve missed, I think, talking about the importance of this organization on a national level. Maybe these things are now coming together in our conversation, but it seems like at the regional planning scale, there is a model that people would turn to an organization like this for guidance on a lot of—organizations are trying to get federal transportation money, and are forming a regional coalition in order to do that. That is how most of our regional planning in Oregon takes place; it’s all about money.
There are a lot of opportunities throughout the country, where, if there were a model certain leaders could turn to—a model, if it were created by this organization—and use it. That regional planning model doesn’t exist, I don’t think, in any cohesive form. The coding, then, is just a piece of that, I think, that follows from the better planning. I always hope that we don’t lose sight of the original purpose of the code: a better plan.
Chip Kaufman:
What I’m going to try to say is ambitious, so it may be hard to understand. But I think it’s on-point of this Council. I’m going to rattle off some elements, here.
We have principles; we’ve nailed that, including being place-based, and codes can deliver that, as Besim (Hakim) has so well explained by the . . . codes that he pointed out. We’ve made the distinction between plugs and appliances, where appliances are actual projects. We’ve also identified the opportunities of generic mechanisms, such as the western Australia (W.A.) code. I would say that the SmartCode is a generic mechanism as well, although I haven’t studied it.
There’s a distinction between the W.A. code and the SmartCode as well. The SmartCode’s strategy is to fit within the regulatory words and mechanisms. The W.A. code, in a sense, is part of a mechanism for W.A., but it actually transcends the legal muck, relatively speaking, and is much more diagrammatic. It represents a limited beginning of what could be the coding “quiver” to do the equivalent of the international style for New Urbanism, but obviously not anonymous in the way modernism was, but place-based. This is incredibly ambitious, but I wouldn’t mention it if I knew a better way to do it: It could be a suite of generic mechanisms, which this organization could produce, that are the tools, rather than the rhetoric.
One suite would be for regions—different regional prototypes, because there is a limited number, as we’ve identified. Another would be for town centers—again, that have different context structures, but there’s a limited number. Another would be fixing existing places. A fourth might be infill or direct edges that affect existing neighbors. And at least in my head—this is no small endeavor—there is the opportunity of producing the generic mechanisms that can embody the Charter, that can address each circumstance, and be adequately coded to generate place-specific, contextual responses.
Did I make clear—I mean, that’s a very ambitious project. It’s not, like, two weeks; it’s more like a year or two, but it’s potentially exactly what the CNU ought to be offering.
Steve Bodzin:
I’m sorry I’m not going to respond to that, because I think it’s brilliant and it’s a great idea, but just to respond to some of the earlier comments.
There are two CNU initiatives right now that do respond to some of the needs that I’ve been hearing this weekend, and I wanted to announce them because I don’t think there’s been, well, I’m the person who is supposed to announce them; I think it’s going to be in New Urban News when you get home.
Two things. First, as far as the specific regional advocacy, at the regional level, we are taking the first steps toward having geographically based chapters. That has the potential for being more of a group that can develop local, customized advocacy, to some extent, in each region, because obviously, everyone has their own state contacts and geographic issues happening, so a Portland chapter is going to be very different from a Miami chapter or a Florida chapter, which is going to be different from a High Plains chapter, because we don’t have enough members in South Dakota to have a chapter there, probably.
So that’s one thing. Keep your ears open for ongoing developments with that. And if you have ideas about your goals and desires for the chapters, please let me know; I’ve been kind of the point person with our consultant on this, and you can reach me at the CNU office. I’m trying to get as much input on this as possible, so that we can do it right.
Secondly, one of the pieces of a land development regulation system is federal. The biggest federal system is the transportation funding system. And right now, as some of you know, here in the states, the federal transportation authorization—it happens every six years; it’s happening this year—well, it’s happening actually in calendar 2003, so they’re writing—the legislators are writing the rules right now. And CNU has so far developed a kind of rough, three-point platform around this that we would like to see get put into place, and we don’t really have the infrastructure to make that happen, and our allies in Washington, D.C., unfortunately, don’t generally understand what we’re talking about, because they are just trying to get more money for transit, really.
The three things are—first of all, a really small one: some funding for the kind of software that we heard Chip talking about yesterday, which allows rapid simulation and visualization of different alternative plans, so that when you have a long-range plan for a region, you can say, “This is going to save you this much infrastructure money, this is going to bring in this much sales tax money.”
Right now, here in the states, we don’t have anything like that, in terms of software. And that’s the kind of thing the feds fund.
Second, we want some funding to go to charrette-type processes on the regional level, because right now, as I’m sure all of you know, if you’re trying to do a region-wide planning process, no matter how much political will there is for it, it’s really hard to get the money for that. And if that was available from regular federal transportation funds, as a cost-saving measure—I mean, it’s a huge environmental streamlining measure, because the single biggest thing that gets in the way of a transportation project is a lack of regional consensus around that project. So we’re talking about a huge potential cost savings on the transportation world if they can plan things in an inclusive way, ahead of time. So we’re really trying to sell that.
Finally, requiring all these regional transportation bodies—the MPOs, as they’re called—to do alternative land use analysis when they’re looking at their long-range plans.
So those are the three points that we’re pushing right now. If you have other ideas, please, again, let me know, or Ellen (Greenberg), or Shelley (Poticha); actually, I guess Shelley has been the main person on this so far, but any of us can take any of your comments. Also, if you have ideas about strategies for getting this done—obviously, we’re having a Congress in Washington, D.C., but that’s four days, and this is a big process.
Melanie Traxler:
I’m with the City of Ventura. I wanted to start off by explaining by background just a little bit. I started off as an environmental planner in California, writing [unintelligible] documents. I transitioned into private sector planning and, more recently, I’m in the public sector, so it’s been interesting through this weekend, to think through the course of my different perspectives: As an environmental planner, how I would approach this; and now, as a city planner, how would we go about enforcing this and what kind of codes would work best for dealing with people at the counter, in trying to deal with the applicants who come in.
Just a couple of things that I would like to see included in the approach. I very much agree with what Bob said earlier, that we really need to look at the perspective of new development as it goes, vs. trying to deal with infill. I like the way Chip was taking it, in terms of five or six different approaches.
I’m really implementation-oriented, and I think we have a vision at this point, but I’m looking down the road: How do you implement? I have a concern about the regional effects and how to deal with it at a regional level. It seems that we’re talking about how to deal with something at a local level; at a code level, I do have concerns that, regardless of what we do and put into the code, there is still going to be that segment of the community that, if we build it here in the city, yes, some of them will come, but there’s still a majority of the public and the development community out there that is going to make more money by selling single-family homes, going with the tradition of sprawl. Especially with the influx of immigrants to this nation; their idea of the American Dream is the single-family unit that is the sprawl. So I think there needs to be some component of the code, or a parallel aspect of it, that deals with the regional or state issues of setting those growth limits so that we have the ability to influence within the boundaries of those limits.
The other thing I wanted to add is that also, at least in southern California, there is the issue of regionalism and the aspect of transit. Many of these types of core communities will only work well if you have regional access to the employment centers, because I’m not seeing them included within some of the smaller scale that we’re approaching. How do we deal with the large-scale employers that maybe employ 2,000 people—
Andres Duany (no mic):
Forgive me for being rude. [Unintelligible] But this is an advanced seminar. This is what the Council is, and you’re in kindergarten. I’m sorry. The Councils are not about what you’re saying. We all know this. Excuse me, [unintelligible]—
Bill Dennis:
Andres.
A. Duany:
What.
Dennis:
Talking about kindergarten—yesterday, you were in second grade.
A. Duany:
Okay.
Dennis:
If you come here—
A. Duany:
Listen, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I was not in second grade. There were lots of people who hadn’t heard it.
Dennis:
I don’t care. I don’t care about those people. It’s the core group here that needs to hear the advanced stuff. We can’t wait for the next session. Next time, come prepared.
A. Duany:
Sure.
Unknown speaker (no mic):
We invited people who [unintelligible]—
Dennis (no mic):
And I think, I think—
A. Duany:
I don’t want to hear about single-family houses and, you know—
Dennis:
Fine, but she has some good points, and I think she should be heard.
Traxler:
Yes, and Andres, you know, from a design standpoint, I totally agree with where you’re going. I am just trying to come back to the realities of the implementation, and when it comes to people at the counter, when we talk about lobbying at the state level, it’s going to be the large-scale developers, and how do we deal with them? So it’s not a question of we can’t do it; it’s like, how do we get around these obstacles? And that’s where I’m coming from.
Rick Bernhardt:
I want to pick up from where Bob started, and also where Chip is, because I think the role of CNU is to provide that integrated framework that ultimately makes a difference on the ground, but it begins with a plan and goes through the implementation process. I’m going to jump on Chip again, because he continues to downplay the importance of the western Australia model, not as a code—it’s important as a code—but to me, it is much more fundamental and important as a planning process that led to a code that made a difference on the ground.
That planning process—the key part of the W.A. approach is that it’s a regional planning process, and it outlines, specifically, the steps, they are tremendously transferable as the basic workbook that we ought to be supporting. And I think that, as we get into this, we need to make a decision as an organization, of the relative role of the transect, because I think that many of us are actually working at the transect level, translating that through the W.A. regional approach, and then you get in, as Chip mentioned, in terms of how you do town centers and all that—we have a lot of different models for that, that we can present, and put together the package of implementation tools. We have a lot of that. We have the first year of your two-year project, done. You all have done it, and refining the transect in terms of viewing the region through the transect, designing it through the process you have, and then beginning to complement that with the tools for implementation. And I think that we have a good framework, but we need to basically seize those, and hopefully begin using some of that as models for the organization.
Crawford:
Besim.
Besim Hakim:
I’d just like to put in a few words again, to thank Andres and Bill for inviting me here. I met great people, and the issues of this Council are very much close to my heart. So in that sense, I’m very gratified.
Just a few points. Regarding the transect, I was thinking of the issues presented in some sort of levels. I was thinking of the transect and the Bill of Rights, which can be spread across the whole country as being more or less uniform. Whether it’s done through the environmental group or multiple groups, I don’t know. But the point is, it’s a very strong concept; I think it’s very viable, that it is applicable to almost any location in the United States.
The Bill of Rights is something which is, the way I understand it, not existing or missing. It’s very important to have a bill of rights that talks about the rights of the individual, the property owner, of what they can and cannot do on their property, including their rights as human beings to have access to certain things; for example, the right to walk to a neighborhood shop, the right to do this or that. So a lot of rights are necessary. These can be, again, promoted on a country-wide basis.
I’ll just say a few more words about codes, but before that, I’m concerned about the concept of the American Dream. The American Dream, as I understand it, relates to the concept of a typical house surrounded by land—your typical suburban, postwar model. And maybe the CNU can promote a redefinition of the American Dream, being that somebody has a place to live, access to certain things in a walking-distance-type situation, and, of course, other issues, so that the whole concept in the minds of people all around the country, shifts from this, in my view, terrible idea, because the two words, “American Dream,” are very powerful words, but in fact, their linkage is a terrible one. So the CNU can actually re-shift this definition.
So these are three points I wanted to say on a country-wide basis. But then, on another level, the question of regionalism. I follow, by looking at plans and proposals for projects done by various members of not necessarily this group, but maybe people who say they are new urbanists, and so on. And I see a lot of similarity everywhere in the country, when you look at the plans. I am an architect/urban designer, so I can detect—of course, architectural style, people try to do something more related to the locality. I can see that, but even that, I see some problems with that. So I think some sort of addressing the question of regional characteristics, identity, and initiative—more important, initiative. Regional initiative. So that these three ideas of the transect, the Bill of Rights, and the American Dream, can translate into regional-type solutions. I feel it’s very important.
Given that, then, of course, the people who are working on these things would develop appropriate codes per project. Thank you very much.
Crawford:
It seems that at least one of the causes of our cultural fetish for single-family homes is the fact that there are so few examples, outside of metropolitan areas, of livable high-density.
Peter Katz:
The item I wanted to touch on—actually, Andres mentioned it very briefly. It has to do with the secondary market.
As I think about it, there are three big barriers out there to New Urbanism and smart growth. One of them is regulatory, the other is the finance industry, and the third has to do with probably public education around issues of density and whatnot.
But those first two are really powerful. It strikes me that there’s a piece of the regulatory strategy that we’re looking at, that could have huge implications for the finance industry. And I want to just describe that for a minute—this issue of the secondary market. And this might be kindergarten for us who are mostly grounded in planning, but it’s an important thing to be aware of.
Right now, when the finance industry wants to shave down the interest rate on a given type of loan, they need to know about the loans they’re making, and they need to understand the product that they’re lending on, and the people that they’re lending to. And any opportunity to lower it just a little bit is a huge windfall for the consumer. So one of the things that happened, for instance, the folks who owned apartments for years felt they were being discriminated (against) by the banks, because the banks charged a higher rate of interest on those loans. And the multi-family housing council came together and did research, and they actually showed that multi-family loans performed better than other categories. They went back to the banks—the primary and the secondary lenders—and they said, “Look at this research. You need to lower our rates.”
And eventually, they did.
Currently, the secondary markets, the silos they use are all use-based. They’ve got secondary markets for housing, for multi-family, and they have other ones for commercial, and still other ones for warehouse, but the minute you start mixing them up, they get totally confused. So if you have a mixed-use building that has more than 20 percent retail, it will no longer qualify for certain of Fannie Mae’s programs. It has nothing to do with the performance of that property; in fact, that 20 percent retail, in a week market—let’s just say you have a Subway sandwich store in it, and the people who pay the rent from Subway are sending checks from Chicago, maybe—and let’s say you’re in a local market where there’s high unemployment, and the residential people aren’t able to make their rent. Well, the presence of the commercial in that building might keep the building afloat in a downtime in the economy, and actually what banks tell me is that some of their best properties are these mixed use properties. The problem is, there’s no way for the bank to understand them, because they need clear silos.
If we could change the silos from “use” silos—which they now have—to “building type” silos. Let’s just say there was a silo for courtyard buildings. What they might discover, if they did research on them over a five-year period, is that indeed, the more mixed the use is, the more robust the loans are. And guess what? Interest rates for those properties would start to drop, and that would be an incentive—a market-based incentive—for mixed use.
So what I’m hoping we’ll do here is examine the spillover effects of some of these coding approaches that we’re looking at, particularly ones that look at typology categories. I’ve been dying to get to Fannie Mae to explain this to them, and if Fannie Mae might sponsor a study to do a charrette, to bring a bunch of new urbanists together to define a handful of building types that we could then do research on for five years and actually track the loan performance, where we begin to establish that mixed use properties perform better, then suddenly, they might set up some new silos to start tracking loans. So it’s these connections between the regulatory and the finance, that could be very powerful. And I hope we don’t lose that.
Rick Hall:
We’re kind of jumping on topics based on the “batting order” we’ve established here! I want to hearken back to something that Chip started, and Rick Bernhardt, with his “talk-show voice,” was able to take a little further.
[Laughter]
The western Australian neighborhood guide, when it first came out—I saw it, what, four years ago or something—I immediately saw that it was one of the best planning processes—the 12-step process that was laid out—that I had ever seen. I’ve probably done about 15 MPO plans, and I could see pretty readily that process overlaying the transportation MPO planning, with land use guiding first and transportation guiding second.
So what we’ve done in our transportation piece that Rick and Peter and Rick are doing—I’ll read you one of the sentences:
“This manual provides a framework for using area context as a basis for regional transportation planning. Frequently occurring land use patterns are highlighted, and the form and elements of transportation networks are discussed. Specific content of regional plans is recommended.”
So we’re going to do land use first, transportation second, in this manual. We’re going to use many of the principles in the W.A. guide as a planning process, and we’re going to also lay in there the land use patterns that are highlighted in the SmartCode and the transect discussions—the major regional tiers being identified by MPO plans.
Now. This is an uphill battle, folks, on the MPO level. I know specifically of an individual on the eastern coast of Florida, who got into land use and transportation as an MPO director, and they lost their job. They’re now working for a public works department in a small city. They were actually fired because they started tinkering with the land use. So most of the regional advances that can be made in this country must deal with the politics first. Regionalism is tough. If you’re in Minnesota or if you’re in the great Northwest out there, there is a more progressive political environment, but regional planning in Atlanta, regional planning in Dallas/Fort Worth, regional planning in Richmond, Virginia? A little tougher! A little tougher.
So those are our experiences with trying to move this regional thing forward in a planning sense, and certainly the codes are downstream from all of this good planning that has to take place.
Kevin Klinkenberg:
To pick up on the regional thing, first, and then a little bit about this idea of the generic.
There are ways that we can impact planning at the regional level, that we don’t talk enough about. A very simple one, one that we overlook a lot, is the idea that every MPO does a long-range transportation plan as part of their funding sequence. Ours is going through this right now—they do this every five years or so—they just produced their plan, and I was one of six people (in a city of two million people) who issued written comments on it. And those comments will be listened to.
The reason I mention that is because, if you read through the document, the first 50 pages of it are absolutely “mom and apple pie,” just like a lot of us are used to in comp plans. It’s wonderful; it almost makes you want to cry because it’s all about New Urbanism and balanced transportation and everything else—and then you come to the appendix, and the list of projects that will receive priority funding, and every single one of them, except for about two, are sprawl-inducing projects. And the comment to make to them is that if they want to achieve the kind of development that they’re after, they need to think about the projects that they’re funding, and the structures—the regional structures and the transportation structures—that they are producing. And that gets into the sector planning or the subregional planning.
Following right on that, there is the level that we haven’t talked enough about this weekend: the city general plans, comprehensive plans (in Missouri we call them growth management plans). Many of these communities have very large planning areas. We did one this year in a community that had a planning area of 28 square miles for a suburban community. In a planning area of that size, you can really begin to set up a structure that has a tremendous impact on, in a sense, a small region. Again, this is some that may not be new urbanist nirvana; it may not be perfect, but you can set up a structure and put it in place with the land use plan, with the major street plan, with the parks and open space plan, that will allow that community to have the flexibility, when they hit that “tipping point,” to be able to do a new urbanist community. Whereas in so many places right now, because of the types of offices and the types of work that is being done for these city plans and general plans, they’re putting into place structures that will not EVER be able to be adapted to anything more than sprawl.
So there is an impact that we can have at that level, that I wish we would all work more toward, just at the level of general plans or comprehensive plans.
The second thing, about this issue of the generic—and this is more of just an internal conflict, as much as anything—I have some problems with too much emphasis on generic solutions. It really strikes me that we are where we are today, in a lot of ways, because of 20th century ideas of planning, that everything was sort of a generic solution to a specific problem that was coming up. And I worry that, in our zeal to extend New Urbanism across the country and to get it into every place, that we will promote our own generic solution that could be just as problematic.
This is a problem of trying to live in the real world as well, and understanding that communities buy codes and do all of these sorts of things, but I wonder, if we thought of this exercise as more of a marathon instead of a sprint (which is what I really think it is; I really think this is more of a 50 to 100-year process than a 10-year process), what are the solutions, then, that we would propose? And would they be more about specific, place-based solutions, and less about finding the generic magic wand that is going to fix it in this state or this community?
Joel Russell:
I’d like to pick up on a couple of his strands, and also go back to what Bob started with, as far as stepping back.
I’d just like to remind us that this movement started as largely a group of designers who had a better way of designing communities, and came up with some wonderful solutions and wonderful projects, and then began to encounter obstacles.
I think the first set of obstacles had to do with traffic engineering. First, the traffic engineers were the enemy, and then we found some to “deputize,” to be our allies—the “three Ricks” among them.
[Laughter]
I think that has been critical to—and we’ve largely overcome that obstacle, as a result of that. I’d like to go back to the fact that our original objective was how to get New Urbanism to happen. And how do we get it to happen at the project level, but also, how do we get it to begin to replace the predominant patterns of sprawl that we’re all unhappy about?
I think we have a lot of agreement about those things. I think the next generation of obstacle we’ve come across has to do with codes, which is why we’re here, I think, because we’ve realized that the wonderful project designs and codes and that have been developed by the designers have not always been translated into law and into effectively administered documents. So that, I think, is why we focused on that. That isn’t to say that plans aren’t important, but it’s the connection between planning and codes, I think, that we really have to get at, and that’s why I think if we can reach some kind of consensus on how to go with that, I think we’ve made a major step forward.
On the issue of generic vs. specific, I think what we need to do is find the right level of generic. The generic can’t get too specific. In other words, the transect is a good example of the level of “genericism,” if you want to call it that, that really does work. If it doesn’t get down too much into the specifics of what’s a T3 and a T4, but if you look at it as a conceptual framework or operating system that offers tremendous flexibility and options, and then if we pick up something like the concepts of the “DNA,” which I passed around—again, those don’t say that it has to be four stories; it says that you have to consider height, and you ought to think about it in terms of stories. And all those other things about street design.
So if we can understand that generically we have a framework in the transect, and if we can agree that that’s a good framework, and if we can agree on what the variables in the DNA are, then I think we’ve made a big step forward. If that can then be translated into a way of doing codes and a recognition that every code is place- and state-specific, and has to be based on a planning process, then I think we have moved forward.
Joseph Readdy:
I think Rick is off at mass right now, but it’s interesting to me as a first-time visitor to the Council that he is the only person who talked about values. We all have values. The codes, the ordinances we work against, have values; they are values-based, we just don’t agree with those values.
In our practice in Portland and Oakland, we’re trying to look at a triple bottom line that includes social values, economic values, and ecological values. This movement has the social values well in hand; they’ve been there from the start. And as Joel just said, implementing the social values through good design has run into things like codes, traffic, etc. We’re starting to overcome those obstacles. Now that Andres has volunteered to ride off under a flag of truth to the ecological movement (and we hope he comes back with his head intact!), the ecological movement is being incorporated.
But we haven’t done as good a job on the economic values. And people—
[END OF TAPE] |
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