Last year, Lake Wales scored two headlines on the same day: One lauded LW for reconnecting to its Olmsted roots (for the #LakeWalesConnected downtown plan). The other screamed that "one of the most imperiled Olmsted legacy landscapes faces new threats" (from ill-conceived sprawl). The followup #LakeWalesEnvisioned initiative is about getting the city’s big picture for future growth (and its form) back on track. Yesterday, I got to introduce #LakeWalesEnvisioned to the national audience of the Olmsted Network as part of their "Conversations with Olmsted" series! My short presentation begins at about 9:00 min in the video. —Victor
The Lifesaving, City-Shaping Power of Parks & Greenways (TPS Ep. 12)
The Dequindre Cut Greenway, Detroit
The design of a city begins with streets and squares and neighborhoods, but it also depends on its parks and open spaces, and the connections between them. Parks, greenways and blueways give form to the neighborhoods and bring nature into the city.
The Olmsted Vaux & Co. plan for Prospect Park, Brooklyn (1868)
Genesis of the modern planning profession
Kim Williams Trail, Downtown Missoula, MT
In many ways today’s practice of city planning was born with parks. Progressive reformers, concerned with public health in the smoky industrial cities, turned to landscape architects to create ample, green, open-to-the-sky spaces where people could relax amid nature, and the air and water could be cleansed. Frederick Law Olmsted’s idea for the Emerald Necklace of interconnected parks and green corridors in Boston was a public health idea, and a water-cleanup idea, not just a leisure idea. And the first American to identify himself as a professional city planner, John Nolen, was in fact a landscape architect by training, with a long career in parks planning already behind him as he began devising new towns and reshaping old ones.
These innovators realized the planning of neighborhoods and transportation corridors and the establishment of open spaces weren’t separate acts, to be dealt with in their own separate professional silos. And they understood that the green parts of a city aren’t just leftovers, to be ignored in between the built-up areas that receive all sorts of attention from architects, engineers and real estate developers. Instead, the natural and green parts should be subjects of design in themselves, allowing for restoration and maximizing community benefits and ecological values.
Starting a plan with the public spaces
Concept for a playground and neighborhood plaza from Plan El Paso (DK&P, 2012)
When we design a neighborhood, we begin with the green parts. We start with the tree-lined streets that link the small spaces where neighbors of all ages come together—including the youngest and oldest among us—and then work our way out to the playfields where children learn teamwork and grow fit, to the greenbelt or natural edges that shape the neighborhood, then to the trails or greenways that give respite in our busy daily lives.
Dover, Kohl & Partners’ original vision for Museum Park in Miami, 2001 (Illustration: Pedro-Pablo Godoy)
Starting with the public space makes life the focus of placemaking, and makes real estate development the backdrop. This is the right order of things, because public spaces are where our memories of cities are formed.
Silos
DK&P concept for transit-oriented development & public square along the South Dade Transitway (2018)
Dover, Kohl & Partners concept for a park in the heart of North Beach (2016)
Today’s parks and recreation programs are often operated in their own departments, separated from the day to day work of city planning departments, but their plans should be integrated, especially now, when park spaces hold the lifesaving, economy-saving solutions for urbanism in the era of climate change.
Pennypack Park, Philadelphia (Photo: Sandy Sorlien)
Rock Creek Park, Washington DC (Photo: Orhan)
Bryant Park, in Manhattan (Photo: James Dougherty)
The economic power of parks
Parks do cost money in a city’s budget, but they add value straight back to the city’s revenue base and to the wealth of surrounding property owners. They save taxpayers money, too:
In the seminal study of its kind, Pennypack Park in Philadelphia was shown to have a positive impact on the value of surrounding taxable real estate of $2,600 per household. That’s $3.36 million per year—in 1974 dollars. (That’s about $17.5 million in 2020.)
Each year, Washington’s Rock Creek Park results in nearly $9 million in additional property taxes to cover crucial municipal needs in the District of Columbia.
Bryant Park in Manhattan offers a story of return on investment. Thanks to its renovation in the early 1990s, with its famous movable tables and chairs, Bryant Park now draws visits from 20,000 people each day. Rents in surrounding areas rose 56% between 1990 and 2002; in the same period, rents on properties directly overlooking the park rose an astonishing 170%.
Physical activities in Sacramento parks yield an estimated $20 million per year in medical-cost savings alone.
Getting there
A basic national goal has been set of having park space within ten minutes’ walk of every home. It’s a start. But it’s not just a matter of keeping the distance short—we also need good means of getting there. Nonmotorized transportation on bike-friendly, walk-friendly streets and multi-user trails are needed to connect our local parks to where we live and work and go to school. Once you arrive, a park should greet citizens with openness and a sense of welcome. In New York City, the Parks Department has spent the last several years removing the barricades and tall metal fences that once walled off the parks from the neighborhoods that surround them. Today we can see what NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver calls “parks without borders,” extending through these renewed connections to give everyone the option of a park life.
Even at the super-regional scale
Large-scale trail systems, like the East Coast Greenway, are gradually taking the interconnected web of park life to the next level, allowing for long nonmotorized commutes and bike tourism. The visions for these systems extend beyond the borders of municipalities and states, linking vast regions. It’s not a new idea. The proving ground for this super-regional approach was the beloved Appalachian Trail, first proposed by naturalist Benton MacKaye in 1921. MacKaye and his followers believed the key to human mental health and happiness was regular exposure to three “elemental landscapes,” essentially consisting of wilderness, working landscapes (like farms and working waterfronts), and cities. MacKaye saw park systems as offering a chance to offset the dehumanizing, de-naturalizing effects of mechanistic industrial work and brutal commerce—which he called “de-creation”—with what has since commonly come to be known as recreation:
“We need the big sweep of hills or sea as tonic for our jaded nerves - And so Mr. Benton MacKaye offers us a new theme in regional planning. It is not a plan for more efficient labor, but a plan of escape. He would as far as is practicable conserve the whole stretch of the Appalachian Mountains for recreation. Recreation in the biggest sense - the recreation of the spirit that is being crushed by the machinery of the modem industrial city - the spirit of fellowship and cooperation.”
Clarence Stein, 1921
Parco delle Rimembranze, Venice.
Green spaces and our physical and mental well-being
We know now that Olmsted, Nolen, Stein and MacKaye—among many others—were onto something big. Decades of scientific studies have linked regular access to green space for physical activity to chronic disease prevention, and the data show that just seeing green spaces speeds healing and boosts wellness. The NRPA Report from 2010 found that a thirty-minute walk among trees “lowers blood glucose levels far more than the same amount of time spent doing physical activity in other settings. Half-hour walks in forest result in larger drops in blood glucose than three hours of cycling.” The same report documents how twenty minutes of walking in a park improved concentration among kids with ADHD at least as much as two frequently prescribed ADHD drugs! Eight separate large-scale clinical studies found that regular visits to green spaces dramatically reduce stress (Stigsdotter, 2010 and Maller, 2008). Dutch researchers established that diagnoses of anxiety disorders are 44 percent higher in residential areas with less green space than in communities well-supplied with parks.
Listening to the land
The traditions in landscape architecture show us that parks, greenways and waterways take their best form when designers listen closely to the lay of the land, from the way the topography rolls, and folding in the natural courses of stormwater. Designed this way, the green weave supports not just human happiness but flood control, water quality, flyways for birds, pollinator corridors for winged insects, the food web, and adaptation to climate change and sea level rise.
The continuum of green: Newfield & its environs (Dover, Kohl & Partners, 2019)
Continuum of green
Pulling all this together, modern day parks-planning practitioners like David Barth describe a “continuum of green” that extends from the tiniest tot lot or pocket park, to the community garden, to the neighborhood square, to the recreational fields, to large scale parks, to restoration of wilderness and conservation areas, and beyond, all interconnected by greenways, tree-lined streets, broad green boulevards, and trails.
Parks, greenways, & blueways are spotlighted in Episode 12 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know. They are of primary importance and they affect everything. As Miami-Dade County’s parks director Maria Nardi likes to say, “Parks just might save the world.”
For more information, check out the Ten Minute Walk commitment campaign from the National Recreation and Parks Association, the Trust for Public Land and others. Also, go to NRPA’s website to learn how to become a Parks Champion.
Parks without borders: Neighborhood square conceived by DK&P for Raleigh (2008)
Every Neighborhood Should Have These Five Things
This one’s all about neighborhoods: Episode 5 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know reached screens Monday, May 11, 2020 via social media and our YouTube channel, and it includes some striking animations by Alex England, Kenneth Garcia, and Pablo Dueñas.
Neighborhoods are the basic building block of a city or town.
In 1929, Clarence Perry documented what he called “The Neighborhood Unit.” His classic diagram remains useful; it’s been updated several times since, including in the early 1990s by Gary Greenan and Lizz Plater-Zyberk for AIA Graphic Standards, and again in 2007 for Doug Farr’s book Sustainable Urbanism.
Clarence Perry’s “Neighborhood Unit.”
When you have one neighborhood standing alone among the farms or in the woods or the wilderness, that’s a village. When growth leads to several of these neighborhoods positioned tightly together, you get a town, and, with even more neighborhoods, a city. In this way, small towns and big cities like Paris or New York or Washington are all cities made of neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods: the fundamental unit of city building.
The five crucial ingredients
Neighborhoods vary a lot, but they have five basic characteristics. We keep these in mind when planning a new neighborhood or when carefully updating or restoring an existing one.
Compact, complete, connected, convivial.
First, a proper traditional neighborhood has an identifiable center & edge. You know when you’ve arrived at the heart of a neighborhood; large or small, it almost always has a deliberate, consequential public space, shared by all. You will typically find a square or plaza, and a noteworthy civic building or landmark (and in the best examples, some locally-serving commerce). Edges, on the other hand, vary greatly. While historically a fortified town might have had a wall for protection, that has thankfully evolved to more inclusive and welcoming physical identifiers. The boundaries between neighborhoods might simply take the form of a mixed-use main street shared by several adjoining neighborhoods, forming a “seam” instead of a seal. Or the edge can be a greenbelt of parkland, forest or farmland, or a water body, or a transit or greenway/trail corridor, or some other feature. All that being said, centers are arguably much more important to the neighbors’ well-being than the edges; the centers are where the bonds of community are most firmly formed.
Second, the neighborhood is limited in size, about five minutes’ walk from center to edge. That’s an easy distance to navigate without driving. It’s also an amount of territory that is easily mentally mapped, committed to memory in great detail, and in an area this size people come to know many of their neighbors. Parents in traditional neighborhoods tend to allow their children greater freedom to roam for these reasons. Five minutes’ walk results in a radius of about a quarter of a mile, but that’s a rough measurement only; neighborhoods are almost never circular! Perry’s neighborhood unit envisioned idealized neighborhoods at a size of about 160 acres, but in practical application we find traditional neighborhoods range from about 40 acres to about 300 acres. Larger sites are designed as multiple neighborhoods. Although there are many ways their edges are defined physically, real neighborhoods don’t extend endlessly across the horizon.
Next, it has a mix of land uses & building types & housing types and prices. That variety allows for some of life’s basic daily needs to be satisfied within the neighborhood. (More on this coming up in Episode 7, on mixed land uses.) An old rule of thumb says, if you can buy a quart of milk within 5 minutes walk, that’s a more livable neighborhood. That’s also a neighborhood where you’re more likely to walk or bike, burning calories instead of fossil fuels. We don’t use the term “neighborhood”to describe vast, standalone precincts of a single land use, like tract house subdivisions, apartment complexes, office parks, or shopping centers. Variety in the housing types and sizes welcomes a wider range of households and income levels, making it possible to blend generations, improve inclusiveness, and to avoid socially harmful concentrations of poverty.
Fourth, the neighborhood should also have an integrated network of walkable streets. Making the streets connected, beautiful and walkable are all key to fostering a healthy culture of physical activity, making public transit viable, creating great addresses that add value to real estate, and more. (Episode 8, on the public realm, and Episode 9, on walkable street design, will cover this in more detail.)
Last, the neighborhood should have some of the best sites reserved for civic purposes, like public buildings, places of worship, parks, squares, and gathering places. These sites are the ones which are lent significance by the artfully composed geometry of the neighborhood plan itself; for example, a civic building is lent prominence by positioning it at the end of a street vista or facing a public square, communicating the importance of the shared institution inside it to the society that built the neighborhood. Public buildings and civic gathering places are crucial anchors that lend certainty in an unpredictable world, precisely because they are more permanent than the private houses or everyday workplaces— so these sites should be identified, set aside and protected from private development right from the beginning.
Neighborhoods: They’re fundamental, and they’re #5 on my list of #townplanningstuff everyone needs to know. —Victor
"Connect the Dots" virtual lecture draws huge audience
On May 4, 2020, Victor Dover delivered a “virtual lecture” for the Civic Conversations series, hosted by the Pensacola News-Journal and the Studer Community Institute. Quint Studer introduced Victor as “the Michael Jordan of urban planning” at the start of this extraordinary event, streamed live for an estimated 6000 viewers. The talk features an in-depth discussion of what makes housing expensive, and what to do about it, including how the costs of housing and transportation must be considered as a composite number, and examples of innovation from around the United States. The event concluded with a live Zoom Q&A moderated by Lisa Nellessen-Savage, executive editor of the PNJ.
TPS Ep. 4, Visualizing Change
The fourth episode in Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is about before-and-after thinking. To do planning and urban design you have to take a hard look at a place to see what’s there, and then imagine in your mind’s eye what it should be, in the future. And then, you have to draw it, somehow, and show it to others, and ask, “Is this what you envision, too?”
This is a visual process, it’s not just planning by the numbers. You have to make your visions visual to really communicate them. Advertisers have long known this; they love to depict the new and improved as compared to the old. Think of the TV commercials showing the dirty t-shirt “before” it’s washed in the new detergent, and how great it looks “after” their product gets used or their advice gets followed! Professionals and policymakers have long needed to apply that kind of communication more often to the big decisions about our built environment.
Historically, some of the most influential thinkers about design understood this well. Landscape architect Humphrey Repton painted garden scenes on two layers of canvas, gluing a hinged top layer depicting “before” conditions over a bottom layer depicting his proposal, so he could show the impact of changes with the turn of a canvas flap. John Nolen, the first American to refer to himself as a professional city planner, titled his book “New Towns for Old,” capturing the before-and-after essence of his visions.
Way back in the 1980s, Joe Kohl, Erick Valle and I saw a TV news report about surgeons who were using crude video imagery to show trauma patients how their faces might look after reconstructive surgery. Before, and After. We thought, what if we could do the same thing to help heal the disfigured American city? That few seconds of television changed the course of our lives. We launched our “Image Network” company— the outfit that over time became our town planning practice— with an emphasis on visualization. We got pretty good at it. Those early contracts to produce electronic simulations and communication tools thrust us in front of the whole range of influencers who really decide what happens in our designed environment, from mayors, planners, architects, developers, and engineers, to preservationists, environmental advocates, economists, housing experts, retail experts, and community activists. We quickly got exposed to how all these folks think, and had to learn to translate among them.
But in those first years we gradually realized, and had to confront, a few key things. One was that most decisionmakers, including architectural designers, are terribly unskilled at envisioning how their abstract plans and elevations will actually turn out once built in the real world, such as how big or small the buildings would be, how the streets would feel, and how their new construction fits (or doesn’t) with its context. Another finding: Once we created effective simulations that showed their projects in the cold light of day, warts and all, they often weren’t sure what to do about it to fix the flaws. We felt the need to transition to leading the design and planning process, rather than just reacting to it as illustrators, after all the big decisions had already been made by someone else. Influential teachers like Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mark Schimmenti, Geoff Ferrell and Jaime Correa taught us about urbanism, and we set out to rebuild our practice around the principles they introduced into our studio.
Today, whenever we propose changes to a street scene or a neighborhood, we use drawings and computer imagery to show how the place you know could be transformed over time, new and improved into a better place. We urge planners to think of plans less like a static map and more like a movie, which changes as you go along. It’s about thinking through change over time, whether the changes are gradual or dramatic and disruptive. This helps community leaders and investors make better choices.
Visualizing Change Before it Occurs: It’s #4 on my list of town planning stuff everyone needs to know. New episodes post each week; please share them, subscribe to the Dover Kohl YouTube channel, and let me know what you think. —Victor
New Video Series: Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know
Greetings friends and colleagues! Today, we’re introducing “Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know,” a new playlist on our Dover-Kohl YouTube channel. Please subscribe to the channel! Over a series of super-short videos, we’re going to take a journey into big ideas, about cities, that should matter to everyone, not just the professionals or experts. Watch these and you’ll be a ready citizen planner.
We’ll look at the root purposes of city planning, the importance of design, and designing in public—and, along the way, we’ll visit topics like architecture, street design, downtown revitalization, historic preservation, green building, lowering your neighborhood’s carbon footprint, the public health impacts of the built environment, and setting your town up for walking, biking, and transit— plus some other surprise topics!
One target audience is the time-stressed, easily-distracted local elected official! So the videos are very quick, bite-size intros to best practices and key breakthroughs. Tell your mayor or councilperson to take a look, even if it’s just for one or two minutes at a time.
We’ve mounted an at-the-office and at-home team effort to create the first season of episodes, with Kenneth García, Pablo Dueñas and my daughter Theresa Lee helping film, animate and edit sequences, and my son Thomas composing and performing original background music. So, welcome to Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know! Share the clips, and let me know what you think.
—Victor Dover