street design

Big RAISE grants for our clients in Lake Wales and Siloam Springs

Siloam Springs and Lake Wales each received significant RAISE grants from the federal Department of Transportation.

Good planning brings return on investment in a number of ways. But one of them is this: Having a coherent plan can move your infrastructure project to the front of the line for funding. This month, the federal Department of Transportation awarded nearly two billion dollars for several projects through the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) discretionary grant program to invest in improving and repairing critical transportation infrastructure and increasing levels of private sector investment.

Talking about streets on Carie Penabad’s "On Cities" podcast

Professor Carie Penabad hosts the weekly podcast On Cities

On March 22, 2024, architect and professor Carie Penabad interviewed Victor Dover for her weekly podcast On Cities. The theme of the conversation was that there’s so much we can learn from the streets built in our past that is still relevant for the streets (and cities) we need to build today. Somehow, in under an hour, Victor talked with Carie about lessons learned from streets in Hickory Grove, Charlotte, Blacksburg, London, Dublin, Miami, Alexandria, Washington, Shanghai, Los Angeles, Coral Gables, New York, South Miami, Beijing, Paris, West Palm Beach, Charleston, Kendall, Kingston, and from little villages, from megacities and from movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, and from TV, including Miami ViceGive a listen and send us your comments on the conversation.

Naturally, Church Street in Charleston came up in the conversation. Photo by Victor Dover

The in-depth conversations on Carie’s show explore the many ways the designed world affects our daily lives.  Thought leaders from wide-ranging professions talk with her about modern challenges in the built environment and innovative responses to them, covering climate change, housing, infrastructure, art, public policy and much more. 

VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network is the leading producer, distributor, and online broadcaster of original live and on-demand talk radio programming worldwide. Tune in each Friday for On Cities at 11:00 AM EST, 8:00 PST on the Voice America Channel; and find all previous episodes on Spotify, Apple iTunes or your favorite podcast platform.

The Power of Street Trees (TPS Ep. 10)

Main Street, Greenville, South Carolina

There’s one detail that makes a huge difference in the public realm, and that’s the humble street tree.

Landscape architect Henry Arnold once said, “Fifty percent of urban design is, street trees.” On a tree-lined street, look up; the canopy forms the ceiling of our shared public room. Arnold wrote, “An urban street without street trees is like a building without a roof.”

Cours la Reine, Paris

Shaping space while lending beauty, order

The Ladd’s Addition neighborhood in Portland

Line street trees up, and something magic happens. A tree-lined street is a deliberate intervention, an ordering of the public space, a statement in the common human language of geometry. It never fails to make a place where more people want to be.

One tree, many benefits

However, street trees are not just about making the place more beautiful and ordering the space, but also:

Shade - They shade our walks and bike rides. Street trees can lower the urban heat island effect, by as much as three to seven degrees Fahrenheit.

Legare Street, Charleston, South Carolina

Value - They make the city more economically potent. Two identical houses in otherwise similar neighborhoods will command wildly different prices, if one is on a tree-lined street and the other isn’t.

Water - They hold stormwater and clean up pollution.

CO₂ - Critically, they sponge up carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas tied to global warming, and then they make oxygen—and we breathe that stuff!

Missoula, Montana

Lower Cooling Costs - In summer, trees shade the buildings and that lowers cooling costs, as much as 35%, and they cut glare, leaving a delightful pattern of dappled light on our streets.

Place, Brand - Flowering trees and autumn leaves put on spectacular annual shows, drawing us to these places.

Troy, New York. Kenneth García photo

Warmth - And in winter, in temperate climates, deciduous trees lose their leaves to let light in to warm the sidewalks and buildings.

Traffic Calming - They keep us safer, calming traffic.

Habits can be broken

For part of the twentieth century, the street tree tradition faded amid compacted city soil, bad habits and poor assumptions. Convinced— by examples with meager, incorrect planting pits—that urban trees will never thrive and they’ll die young, decision-makers began to question whether they were worth the effort and expense. Public works officials started trimming budgets with the old line, “We’ll add the trees in a later phase.” Some minimalists, seeing starkness as a virtue, pulled their architecture away from trees into wide-open displays. Some landscape architects and arborists began to oppose traditionally aligned trees with close spacing, arguing that this geometry was too formal and dissimilar from the way certain trees grow in the wilderness, and pointing out that the roots under each tree need substantial space. They were willing to forgo the benefits and visual effects of allowing the upper branches to intersect with those of the adjacent trees and having more continuous shade for pedestrians. During the same period, departments of transportation were focused on speeding up and accommodating more cars rather than slowing them down. So they started to see shade trees as a liability, insisting on flimsy “frangibles” instead of the sturdy oaks, maples and elms customary in times past.

Get the planting details correct

Generous planting areas on the avenues of Chicago, Illinois

The turnaround came as landscape architects like Arnold and others realized that, with the right planting details and species choices, urban trees can indeed thrive. Much depends on the preparation of the hole in which the tree will be planted. For example, for the Live Oaks common on streets here in Florida, one key is not only allowing for a larger area of loosened soil below ground for the primary roots seeking water, but also for a larger open area up top around the tree, where fine hair-like roots seek air and filtered sunlight. Our landscape architect Jay Hood specified an innovative planting system for Park Avenue in Winter Park that freed the tree trunks from tight wells with metal grates and allowed for walkable surfaces to float above the roots and loosened soil below. Those trees have defied all expectations and grown quite tall. Many people are surprised to learn they were planted so recently.

In the last couple decades, new techniques and products have emerged to improve the success of street trees in urban areas where space is tight and impervious surfaces predominate. So-called “structural soil” and underground suspension systems have become common. These allow the roots to spread within loosened soil without ramming into excessively compacted earth, yet they solve the problematic lifting of sidewalks.

Green Blue Urban’s tree root system, undergoing installation in Thomasville, Georgia. Rick Hall photo

On wide boulevards and leafy residential streets where trees can be planted in linear, continuous landscape strips, your crew can dig a long trench for the whole tree line rather than individual circular holes. After planting and backfilling (avoiding too much compacting), this produces a larger area of loosened soil for the roots to explore. Naturally this requires thinking ahead about the alignment of underground utilities, drainage, and other details. Bottom line: Consult a competent professional on the right way to plant your street trees.

Beautiful exceptions: Cour du Commerce Saint-André in Paris, and Calle Malasia, in Buenos Aires’ Belgrano neighborhood

Exceptions to the rule

For all the reasons we’ve reviewed, on most of our streets and in most of our communities, we’re better off with lines of street trees, especially in temperate, moderately humid climates. But there are exceptions to this rule. For example, extraordinarily arid places where water is scarce or costly call for other solutions to supplying shade and visual interest, such as narrow streets with buildings brought closer together and cantilevered architectural elements that encroach beyond the building envelope. Fewer trees can also be best for far-north climates where letting more sun in during the many shortened days outranks having shade on the rare warm day. Even in a sunny place where trees grow easily, we might still opt for a unique, skinny, tree-less street here and there in a neighborhood plan, to diversify the addresses and experiences on offer. There are also many kinds of commercial streets and passages, and not all require shade trees; some replace the canopy effect with suspended fabrics, galleries, or portals; others establish the visual interest with creative signs and artwork or palms or flowers instead of shade trees. With or without trees, we also take care to keep clear lines of sight to signage and storefronts on mercantile streets. In Street Design, we also wrote about the usefulness of what Raymond Unwin called the “lean-in” tree, planted in the adjacent garden instead of within the right-of-way.

As with every other detail in city design, context is crucial.

Standard equipment for great cities

When they’re right, they’re right, which is most of the time—so street trees are not just a decorative frill, something to be cut when the budget’s tight. They’re mission-critical equipment in making good, resilient cities and towns, and that’s why they’re number ten on my list of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know.

For more information, check out my TEDx talk (it’s a love poem to street trees), and read what John Massengale and I wrote about “The Seven Roles of the Urban Street Tree” in Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, or read Henry Arnold’s classic, Trees in Urban Design.   --Victor

Episode 10 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is all about street trees. This episode is illustrated with photos, diagrams and video from Yellow Springs, Ohio; Rochester, Buffalo, Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York; Barcelona, Spain; Washington, DC; Guilin, China; Stockholm, Sweden; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Paris, France; Greenville, SC; and Miami, South Miami, Coral Gables, Lake Wales, and Winter Park, Florida. Next episode: Street-Oriented Architecture.

Pont Street, London

The World Between Buildings (TPS Ep. 8)

Episode 8 begins a block of five short films on city life as it’s experienced outdoors, between buildings. Upcoming episodes focus on walkable and memorable streets, the importance of street trees, street-oriented architecture, and parks, greenways and blueways.

The "public realm" is where our first impressions of your whole city are formed. In this video, urban designer Victor Dover outlines how these spaces between...

The public realm

Towns and cities speak to us through their outdoor spaces—the public realm, the world between the buildings. Those public spaces, whether street or parks or squares or plazas, are composed, given their shape and focus, by the design and placement of buildings and the landscape. There’s usually a sense of enclosure and completeness where the public realm is strong. Sometimes the space is narrow, sometimes wide, at times intimate, at times opening up to and contrasting with long vistas.

Street-oriented architecture is a vital ingredient for a positive experience in the public realm.

Your city is a communications device. It’s sending you a message. Is it welcoming people?

Wide or narrow, as you move about the neighborhood day to day, the public realm is where you’re spending your time. And when that public realm is thoughtfully planned and designed, it sends you a message of confidence and comfort and neighborliness. It’s where memories are made, where friends can meet, where ideas are exchanged, where commerce and art and culture and civic life intersect.

Caveat: It could be sending everyone the wrong message.

Warning: Your public realm could be sending all the wrong signals

It’s easy, however, to get it all terribly backwards, and when the public realm is starved for attention and quality, it sends exactly the opposite message: that this is a place where nobody cares, a message of uncertainty. The public realm is where our impressions of the whole city or countryside are formed— for good or ill.

The public realm is just as important in rural places

Experiences

What experience is your neighborhood offering?

The public realm is crucial everywhere, but it’s especially so in cities that need to attract population and investors for revitalization, and in tourist destinations. Give people a good experience, and they’ll return, and help you build a stronger economy, a better tax base, and a creative culture.

If you want people to return, your public realm has to exude confidence. The design is crucial.

The public realm matters, so whether you’re a mayor or a real estate developer or just a taxpayer, it needs your attention. That’s #8 on my list of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know. For more information, check out the Dover Kohl YouTube channel. —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.

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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