New Urbanism In Stages

http://bettercities.net/article/four-phases-new-urbanism-21485

Shopfront homes in Kentlands, Maryland
bettercities.net

Hello Everyone:

Yours truly is back after an exhausting, yet reasonably successful day of helping dear mama entertain family. Now it is back to the blogosphere with an article by Robert Steuteville for Better Cities titled, "The four phases of New Urbanism."

New Urbanism began about twenty-thirty or so years ago "...as a large-project greenfield movement.  Some new urbanists concentrated on infill...but their efforts attracted less media attention and investment."  From an intellectual perspective, New Urbanism aspired to reinvigorate whole regions, particularly historic cities and towns, which were the inspirations for a revival of walkable places.  Nevertheless, thirty years cities were serious trouble-nearly every developer focused on the suburbs.  New urbanists saw this as their clarion call to right the damage done by sprawl.

ArtsQuest Fine Arts Festival
Seaside, Florida
waltonoutdoors.com

This is what Mr. Steuteville calls "the first phase of New Urbanism, in which traditional neighborhoods developments (TNDs), inspired by historic neighborhoods, were built as alternatives to conventional master planned communities." Typical TNDs such as Seaside, Florida and Kentlands, Maryland signify this era very we; representing incubators of ideas.  These TNDs were private-sector endeavors that carved out pockets of urban areas by overcoming the legal and administrative obstacles in the way of compact development.  This phase continued until the home mortgage industry collapse of 2008.  Developers proved that if you build mixed-use neighborhoods with main streets, people will come and live there.  Long ignored building types were brought back into the light of American markets such as: shopfront houses, small apartment buildings, granny flats, courtyard housing. assorted mixed-use buildings, and small-lot houses with usable porches and garages in the back.

Paseo Verde Apartments
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
paseoverdeapts.com

Walkable street intended for slow-moving traffic were argued for and built.  The walkable streets types included narrow residential streets, main streets, boulevards, and avenues. These types of streets continue to run through historic neighborhoods, few proposed reviving them prior to New Urbanism.  Mr. Steuteville writes, "The urban-rural Transect was conceived and explained, and new land-use codes-form-based codes-were created as alternatives to conventional zoning."  He continues, explaining, "The difference between a neighborhood built around a five-minute walk and conventional suburban development was explained over and over to public officials, professionals in fields dealing with land use, and citizens."  Quoting Mike Lydon and Anthony Garcia from the soon to be released book Tactical Urbanism, Mr. Steuteville, writes, "The early victory of the New Urbanism was in shifting the academic and professional conversation away from mass suburbanization as the only available model for human habitat."  Now we move onto Phase Two.

Orenco Station
Portland, Oregon
planetizen.com

Like the movement of time, the phases of New Urbanism overlap each other.  To recap, new urbanism began as an infill movement.  The HOPE VI public housing redevelopment, enacted during the Clinton Administration, was hailed as a victory for cities and the movement. Strangely enough, redevelopment came to the forefront after the housing collapse.  Robert Steuteville cites two reasons for why it took about ten years for redevelopment to occur: "First, the market for building in cities had steadily grown as crime dropped throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.  Second, the Great Recession stopped greenfield growth in its tracks and dried up financing for large projects. Suddenly redevelopment looked very appealing.

The neglected behemoth infrastructure of historic cities and towns could built upon once again.  The existing street layout provided the skeleton for mixed-use communities favored by new urbanists.  In a score for historic preservationists, mixed-use centers and historic building could be rehabilitated or could be bracketed by new construction.  Even as new urbanists travel through Phase 2, a scaled down version of Phase 1 marches on as older TNDs move toward completion and news are set to launch.

New Town at St. Charles
Near St. Louis, Missouri
southernliving.com

Phase 2 comes with fantastic advantages-previous builders were better at putting new construction in urban places-they left an amazing legacy of historic buildings with great attention to detail and superior transit services. This is why historic cities are located in the some the best locations.  As long as there is a market for an established city or town, there is less of a need to build new.  Phase 2 operates in a broad range of real estate: downtowns and downtown adjacent, streetcar neighborhoods, rehabilitated industrial district, small cities and towns, and transit-orient properties.

Phase 2 builds on the phase 1 lessons.  Mr. Steuteville writes, "Form-based codes work particularly well in older places that are undermined by conventional suburban codes." New urbanist street grids help fix city streets damaged by auto-oriented traffic engineering. Also useful are building type and market studies generated for TNDs.  Mr. Steuteville continues, "Phase 2 breaks new ground in many areas, including finance reform for mixed-use buildings, parking policy, Tactical Urbanism and Lean Urbanism, and transit-oriented development.  The architecture produced in Phase 2 is more varied and robust."

Habersham
Beaufort, South Carolina
habershamsc.com

Robert Steuteville predicts that Phase 2 will go one for decades but suggests that it may cause some problems that will require New Urbanism to further evolve.  The big issue is the dreaded g-word: gentrification.  Blogger, like Mr. Steuteville, support community and neighborhood revitalization, but the inventory of nineteenth and twentieth century street grids is not infinite.  This limited stock can result in higher prices (in housing, perhaps, Mr. Steuteville does not specify) in economically viable cites with "good bones."

Another challenge with focusing on neighborhoods and communities with historic street grids is that it offers little assistance to places already swallowed up by sprawl.  Mr. Steuteville reports, "Up to 90 percent of the land in metropolitan areas has been shaped as conventional suburban development.  These areas will become less accessible as transportation habits change and as fewer people drive."
Thus with have two systems operating simultaneously older more walkable mixed-use neighborhoods situated on historic street grids and larger more conventional suburban developments.  This brings us to Phase 3.

Mashpee Commons
Mashpee, Massachusetts
buildabetterburb.com

 Phase 3 of new urbanism involves a suburban retrofit, meaning "sprawl repair."  Planning books have gone to great lengths describing this burgeoning trend.  Essentially, the new urbanists have been trying to convert "grayfields" into urban place for some time. Mashpee Commons, Massachusetts (left) and Mizner Park are two examples of mixed-use town centers built on the site of former shopping-a metamorphosis that began in the late eighties.  Sprawl is huge-these projects are still far and few in between.  Phase 3 will take center stage when automobile-centric transportation engineering undergoes major reforms.  When this happens, sprawl repair will ease the pressure off historic neighborhoods. The end result is a fresh supply of walkable places will emerge.

The postwar suburbs have the greatest potential for creating affordable places to live.  According to June Williamson, the co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, "Twenty-six million houses were built from 1946 and 1965, most single-family...These early postwar suburbs were built with mostly connecting streets and fading commercial strip lying fallow nearby."  The abandoned parking lots on these properties hold the possibility of holding a plethora of residential units.  Therefore, Phase 3 New Urbanism can reinvigorate languishing inner-circle suburbs, however, Mr. Steuteville cautions, "...first, multilane arterials must be narrowed, redesigned, and made walkable."  He continues, "This outcome still seems hard to imagine, despite the success of the complete streets movements.  Yet the formidable transportation industrial complex, the biggest impediment to Phase 3 New Urbanism, is showing signs that it will yield to pressure."  Change is coming but meanwhile onto Phase 4.

Mizner Park
Boca Raton, Florida
city-data.com

Now we come to Phase 4 when things will come full circle and street grids will return to their state a 100 years.  These street grids are not necessarily rectilinear like the nineteenth century grids-they just have to be connected, both internally and externally.

Robert Steuteville writes, "The normalization of new street grids may grids may be decades away, but extensively connected street networks are the natural way communities, absent the obstruction caused by automobile-oriented transportation engineering and street policies."  Mr. Steuteville is quite adamant about reformation in the transportation field if Phase 4 is to go into effect.  He emphasizes, "This is why the techniques that I associate with Phase 3 must come first.  Expect to see early pioneering efforts in reestablishing new street grids that connect to larger thoroughfare networks."

Do not expect to see the demise of auto-centric suburbs in Phase 4 New Urbanism any more than the end of historic cities and towns in the previous century.  Auto-centric suburbs will continue to exist and grow due to zoning laws and infrastructures that bolsters separate use methods of transportation.

New Urbanism is slowly coming into being in phases.  We are on the way to seeing changes that will emerge over generations.  On this long journey, it helps to have a road map.  At the moment we are deeply immersed in the revitalization of cities and towns, critical components to this trend which includes: architecture, building types, finance, codes.  This is crucial work but not end result; how we design and lay out our streets will ultimately act as the foundation for our communities.  Robert Steuteville writes, "New Urbanism was founded by architects, and we have learned much from them. But transportation planning and street design will set the course for the future."