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
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
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
Ep. 2, The Importance of Design
The second episode of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is now on the Dover-Kohl YouTube channel. This short new installment introduces a crucial topic: why we can’t overestimate the importance of design, versus mere policy planning.
If you only know the land use or the density or the setbacks or the required number of parking spaces, you won’t know whether a development is good for the neighborhood or bad. In the video, we compare two places. The density? The lot size? The land use? All are exactly the same. But I’ll bet you’d prefer to live in one of them, and not the other.
The design is even more crucial than the land use. The character of a street scene comes from the building-to-street relationships, the landscape, the shape and quality of the public spaces, and the texture and proportions of the architecture. If your little lot or parcel presents a blank wall or a parking lot as its face toward the public realm, that will make everybody less likely to walk or bike or use transit—so small decisions have regional implications.
Design matters. That’s #2 on my list of town planning stuff everyone needs to know. Let us know what you think of the episode, watch for another one next week, and please subscribe to the Dover Kohl channel on YouTube. —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