The
term “Balanced Community” is now used with
some frequency. From time to time questions crop
up and so it is time for a Backgrounder on the
topic.
In
"The Shape of the Future" we
used the term “Planned New Community”
throughout the book to identify the prototype of
an Alpha or “balanced” Community. In the
text we used the phrases “balanced
community” or “relative balance of jobs /
housing / services / recreation / amenity at the
community scale” when talking about the Alpha
Community, the community-scale organic building
block of functional human settlement pattern.
With
the publication of the first edition of "Handbook"
in 2001 we introduced the term “Balanced
Community.” We made this addition because it
turned out that the word “new” in Planned
New Community (PNC) led some to conclude that
PNCs were only relevant in a “greenfield”
context. As will be noted below, that is not a
useful assumption.
Over
the past 50 years the frontier of urban land use
has expanded to the extent that now, in order to
create functional human settlement patterns,
most new urban land uses must be located on
vacant and underutilized land inside this
frontier.
In
addition, at the time "The Shape of the
Future" was written S/PI had not yet
articulated the critical role of the Balanced
(But Disaggregated) Community that exists
outside the Clear Edge around the core of the
New Urban Region.
Balanced
(But Disaggregated) Communities are found in the
Countryside. The Countryside covers (or should
cover) a major portion of the land area of every
New Urban Region.
In
the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region the
percent of Countryside should be between 90 and
95 percent of the total land and water area for
there are to be Balanced Communities inside the
Clear Edge, and Balanced (But Disaggregated)
Communities in the Countryside.
(For
a description of the tax treatment of land
inside and outside the Clear Edge that also
provides useful illustrations of the role of the
Clear Edge, see “Beyond
the Clear Edge,” May 2003.)
We
start the exploration of the Balanced Community
with a refresher on the “Planned New
Community” and then move to focus on key
issues related to Balanced Communities
Planned
New Communities
The
following is how the section on Planned New
Communities opens in Chapter 18 of "The
Shape of the Future." (For this
Backgrounder a few words have been added for
clarification and the footnotes in the original
text are emitted.)
“THE
PLANNED NEW COMMUNITY—ALMOST NOTHING IS AS OLD
AS THE PLANNED NEW COMMUNITY
“Planned
New Communities are urban places created with
the goal of providing a functional range of
jobs, housing, services, recreation and amenity.
What distinguishes Planned New Communities is
that they represent the intentional distribution
of human activity at the community scale. They
are not agglomerated by a happenstance
distribution of separate projects responding to
individual interpretations of need, utility or
‘the market.’
Planned
New Communities are intended to accommodate
the anticipated economic, social and physical
needs of citizens in their daily, weekly –
and for many – their month-to-month lives.
For some citizens, a Planned New Community
meets most of their needs for months–and
sometimes for years at a time.
(Prior
chapters of "The Shape of the Future"
deal with the evolution of urban form and note
that historically, the word for “community”
and the word for “city” were the same in the
languages of the time.)
Although
serendipity can make important contributions to
civilization, happenstance human settlement
pattern has not proven to be a viable
alternative for urban settlement patterns. That
has been especially true since the start of the
Industrial Revolution.
“Few
ideas in the civilized world are as old as the
idea of the Planned New Community (or as they
are sometimes referred to, planned new
‘towns’ or planned new ‘cities’).
Almost from the establishment of the first
urban settlement, a preferred strategy for
creating a new urban space in a separate
location has been the development of a Planned
New Community.
“Planned
New Communities (PNCs) were the vehicle used to
colonize of the Classical World by the
Phoenicians and the Greeks. They were the
primary urban form that the Romans used to
settle and manage the Imperial World. PNCs
were the vehicle for the resettlement of Europe
after the 8th century and again following the
Black Death in the 14th century. They were also
a commonly applied strategy for creating urban
space in Asia, Africa and Mesoamerica before
European colonization.
"Planned
New Communities were used to create the urban
places necessary for the exploration and
exploitation of the Americas, Africa, India and
Southeast Asia by the colonizing European nation
states. This process was driven by the forces
articulated in Jared Diamond’s "Guns,
Germs and Steel." Except for Boston,
every substantial settlement by English, French,
Spanish, or Dutch colonists on the Atlantic and
Gulf Coasts of what is now North America was a
Planned New Community. Jamestown, St. Marys, St.
Augustine, Williamsburg, Annapolis, Savannah,
Philadelphia, New Orleans, Montreal and New York
(New Amsterdam) each began as a Planned New
Community.
“Further,
planned community strategies were employed in
the expansion of urbanized areas during the
colonial period and following the Revolutionary
War including plans for the National Capital.
(We have noted elsewhere that the last plan that
balanced land use and transportation in what is
now the National Capital Subregion was the
L’Enfant plan of 1791.)
“The
creation of urban space—and thus Planned New
Community design and implementation – was
historically a governance function. It still is
in most of the world. In the United States, new
communities sponsored by the governance
structure as the primary mode of urban
development declined after the early 1800s. This
reflected the spirit of individualism,
speculation and exploitation that brought Andrew
Jackson to the presidency in 1828.
“The
Planned New Community idea was not completely
eclipsed in the United States by the Jacksonian
perspective. Planned New Communities by
religious groups, industrial and mining
enterprises, railroads and some ‘sub’urban
entrepreneurs made up a significant part of the
new urban fabric created in the United States
during the last two-thirds of the 19th century.
“Planned
New Communities do not provide all the
answers; they are not an end-all in shaping
the human settlement pattern. Planned New
Communities—and planned new Villages and
Neighborhoods—do provide examples of how
pattern and density of land use can support
economic prosperity, social stability and
environmental sustainability.”
[The
sections of "The Shape of the Future"
that follow the above quoted material in Chapter
18 outline the role of Planned New Communities
in the 20th century.]
As
transport and communication technology advanced
and the demand for urban habitat accelerated,
private sector “projects” replaced plans for
organic, balanced additions to the urban fabric.
These forces in essence eclipsed the central public
role of developing urban fabric and masked the
public responsibility for creating functional
human settlement patterns.
As
David Riesman has observed, the United States of
America is the only major nation state in the
world that relies primarily on land speculation
to create human settlement patterns.
Balanced
Community Imperative
Let
us next consider the Five Critical Realities for
the National Capital Subregion.
The
first four are as follows:
1.
There is already too much land devoted to, and
held for, urban land uses in the National
Capital Subregion.
2.
The National Capital Subregion's jobs are
center-weighted now and will be center-weighted
for the foreseeable future.
3.
Scattered urban land uses cause an irrational
and untransportable distribution of trips which
is the root cause of gridlock.
4.
There must be an equitable distribution of the
costs of services, not subsidies for those who
create and profit from dysfunctional human
settlement patterns as is the case now.
The
same realities apply for every New Urban Region
in the United States with some variation that
reflects topography and other specific
influences on the evolution of human settlement
patterns in those locations. For a review of the
data that supports these four realities see the
Backgrounder, "Five
Critical Realities."
The
fifth reality is that “Without Balanced
Communities within a sustainable New Urban
Region, the future is bleak.” This statement
reflects the conclusion from the first 14
chapters of "The Shape of the Future"
and is articulated below.
The
Imperative of Defining a Balanced Community and
Setting Clear Parameters for It
There
must be a clear understanding of what a Balanced
Community is because “everyone” is selling
“community.” End
Note One outlines this problem as
articulated in "The Shape of the Future."
As
suggested in End Note One, builders sell every
conceivable grouping of dwelling units as a
“community.” Enterprises, institutions
and agencies sell and/or promote almost every
conceivable good and service as a way to
promote, create and enhance “community.”
In
all this promotion of “community” there is
no definition of what a community might be, no
scale criteria, no pattern criteria, no density
criteria, nothing. The only thing that is clear
is that community is not synonymous with any
known municipal boundary. In spite of this, the
national organization of municipal planners has
changed its logo slogan to embrace its role in
creating “great communities” with no
definition of what a community is beyond the
assumption that it relates somehow to the
municipal boundaries of the jurisdiction where
the planner works.
That
is why we have included the brief review of the
history of Planned New Communities above and why
we stress the importance of “balance” in the
definition cited in End Note One.
With
an overview of Planned New Communities and an
understanding of the need for a balance of jobs
/ housing / services / recreation / amenity,
what else constitutes the basics elements of an
understanding of Balanced Communities?
Balanced
Community Location within the Organic Structure
of Human Settlement Pattern
First,
the context of the Balanced Community: What is
the place of the Balanced Community within the
New Urban Region’s organic structure?
The
New Urban Region is the fundamental building
block of contemporary First World (urban)
society. The New Urban Region is the smallest
organic component of human settlement that can
achieve and maintain economic, social and
physical sustainability. All other components,
larger and smaller, are either agglomerations of
New Urban Regions (or Urban Support Regions) or
sub sets of these basic building blocks. (See End
Note Two.)
Below
the regional scale the picture is quite simple.
New Urban Regions are made up of Balanced
Communities. In other words the Balanced
Community is the next smaller organic component
of human settlement below the New Urban Region.
Balanced
Community Basics - Scale
There
is no specific size or scale to qualify as a
Balanced Community. The scale is determined by
the size of the urban agglomeration necessary to
achieve a relative balance of jobs / housing /
services / recreation / amenity within the
regional context–either in a New urban Region
or an Urban Support Region. (See End
Note Three.)
Like
the “sustainability” of a New Urban Region,
the “balance” of a Balanced Community is a
relative term. If a well founded, factual
challenge can be made to the “balance” of a
specific community, one has probably drawn the
wrong boundary around the component.
There
are many variables to consider in defining a
Balanced Community. As society has become more
complex, the scale of a Balanced Community has
increased. As noted earlier, historically the
trading village and then the “city” was a
“community.”
As
the urban complexes grew and morphed to become
19th century “Industrial Agglomerations” and
then to become 20th and 21st Century New Urban
Regions, the role and importance of the
community-scale component did not go away. (See End
Note Four.)
As
one moves from the periphery toward the centroid
of a New Urban Region the scale of the Balanced
Community becomes larger. This scalar change is
analogous to the relative gravitational pull of
planets around a star.
Elements
Necessary to Create a Balanced Community
Beyond
an understanding of context and scale, what are
the most important elements necessary to create
a Balanced Community?
Land.
Land is necessary but, as noted above, there is
already too much urbanized land. This is where
“new” in Planned New Community becomes a
problem. Land is an important element -- but not
open land that might provide a blank slate as it
did for “garden cities” or post World War II
“New Towns” in Great Britain, France or
Scandinavia. Balanced Communities must be
agglomerated from existing land uses plus new
land uses on vacant and underutilized land. That
is why catalysts such as station areas of shared vehicle mobility
systems are so critical.
Money.
Money is essential but “patient capital” is
not the only requirement. In fact, interest eats
up capital faster than value is created over the
long term. The economics of this reality are
beyond the scope of this Backgrounder.
However, this fact is the reason there must be a
core role for the public in creating Balanced
Communities and functional human settlement
patterns in general.
A
Real Partnership of Public and Private Interests.
There must be a real partnership of public and
private interests because the creation of
Balanced Communities and functional human
settlement patterns in an advanced, technology-based
society costs a lot of money. One needs to keep
firmly in mind that the attempt to create
mobility and access or affordable and accessible
housing, to say nothing of ensuring safety and
happiness in dysfunctional human settlement
patterns, costs exponentially more money.
An
Understanding. More important than land,
money or joint public/private commitment is the
imperative for a broad public understanding of
the need for Balanced Communities. There is no
way to marshal the land, money and public
support for Balanced Communities without broad
public understanding. The significant federal
support (and some state and municipal support)
for Planned New Communities in the late 60s and
70s was not enough to maintain even the modest
programs initiated at that time.
A
Plan. A “plan” is necessary to create
Balanced Communities but it is not the
“pie-in-the-sky plan” or the
“planners-pipe-dream” that is tossed up as a
strawperson for “realistic” critics to hack
down. These strawpersons are put forward by
those who think they can make money or continue
to make money from Business-As-Usual.
Every
pattern and density parameter and relationship
put forward for a Balanced Community by
SYNERGY/Planning meets two criteria:
-
First,
it is what the private sector has actually
built over the past 30 years if the
development entity is required to
internalize at least some of the costs of
the settlement patterns, including the cost
of roadways, water supply, sewage disposal,
storm water management and sites for public
facilities (e.g. schools) as well as
cluster-scale, neighborhood-scale and
village-scale amenities. These
projects are market projects that have sold
fast enough to make a reasonable return on
investment.
These
patterns and densities also consume the lowest
levels of service and energy -- especially
energy to provide mobility and access. That
is why the default patterns and densities which
land speculators, builders and real estate churn
agents claim that citizens “really want”
require vast public subsidy of mobility,
utilities, facilities and services.
As
we pointed in “Wild
Abandonment,” Sept. 8, 2003, Balanced
Community patterns and densities are the very
same ones that have been the most favored and
most effective in making citizens prosperous,
safe and happy for thousands of years. They are
the patterns and densities of land use that
tourists spend billions of dollars to visit
every year. This is true of San Francisco, New
Orleans, Charleston, Georgetown, Boston,
Toronto, Paris, London, Stockholm, Wien,
Provence,
Tuscany or the Cotswolds.
In
a market economy, if a product is too expensive,
the solution is to build more of it. This is a
core problem because those who own the most
highly valued property, e.g. Old Town or The Fan,
do not want nearby new development to lower the
value of their property.
While some NIMBY
opposition is based on the fear that “lower
standards” will drive down the value of
property, much of it is based on the realization
that new development will undermine monopoly
pricing.
How
Do We Start to Build Balanced Communities?
As
outlined in "Handbook,"
potential Balanced Communities are not
implemented by bureaucratic “Master Plans”
or by draconian government controls. They are
implemented by citizen and enterprise decisions
in an informed market and supported by the full
and equitable allocation of location dependent
costs.
Citizen
support for Balanced Communities will grow only
where there is broad realization of these facts
and an understanding that:
-
Access
to more land will not generate affordable,
much less accessible housing and, thus,
there cannot be a balance of jobs / housing
/ services / recreation / amenity without a
Fundamental Change in human settlement
patterns.
Citizens
will not start to understand any of these
realities until those who support Fundamental
Change stop using confusing words
(“suburban,” “city,” “local,”
“rural,” etc., etc.) to describe these
realities. Every time one of the Core Confusing
Words is used it reinforces bad assumptions and
misinformation wrapped around “The
Myths That Blind Us,” Oct. 20, 2003. If
one does not like our vocabulary, develop a new
one. Using the old one just plays into the hands
of Business-As-Usual.
We
outline the process to create Balanced
Communities in the "Handbook."
There is a sketch introduction to a new way of
thinking about evolving functional human
settlement patterns and Balanced Communities in
“The
Shape of Richmond’s Future,” Feb. 16,
2004. A future column will outline what it would
be like to live in a Balanced Community within a
Sustainable New Urban Region.
--
August 23, 2005
End
Notes
(1)
The following definitions are taken from the
APPENDIX ONE--LEXICON and APPENDIX TWO–Core
Confusing Words of "The Shape of the
Future" with footnotes omitted. In
"The Shape of the Future,"
words defined in APPENDIX ONE–LEXICON are in
bold throughout the book and New Urban Region is
in bold and italics. The discussion in APPENDIX
TWO–CORE CONFUSING WORDS is included first
because it spells out why use of the word
“community” is problematic.
COMMUNITY
(From APPENDIX TWO–CORE CONFUSING WORDS)
The
term community is widely used and wildly
misused. The primary dictionary definition of community
is:
“A
group of people living in the same locality and
under the same government.” Until 1850,
this definition fit most citizens living in a
city. With the emergence of the industrial
agglomerations and now the New Urban
Regions, this definition is no longer
relevant and is the cause of significant
confusion.
Because
community is deemed to have a positive
connotation, it is overused in advertising,
journalism and literature. The core historic
meaning has been completely eclipsed. Community
is now applied in the best tradition of Humpty
Dumpty; it is whatever the speaker intends. See
use of community in President Bill
Clinton’s 1996 State of the Union address.
COMMUNITY
(From APPENDIX ONE-LEXICON)
In
this text, community is an organic
component of human settlement pattern. To
ensure clarity, it is frequently used with the
prefix alpha or beta. Alpha
Community and Beta Community are
defined below.
Alpha
Community is an important organic
component of the human settlement pattern.
An Alpha Community contains a range of
economic, social and physical attributes
necessary to support a jobs/housing/services/
recreation/amenity balance. Functional New
Urban Regions at least in part are
composed of Alpha Communities. Alpha
Communities are composed of Alpha
Villages.
Other
components of the human settlement pattern are Alpha
Neighborhoods, Alpha Clusters and Alpha
Dooryards.
Beta
Community is used to identify those places
that have the geographical area and location
attributes that will allow them to become Alpha
Communities. Also see Beta.
Uses
of the term community in this text are
limited to avoid conflict with the generic
definition discussed in Appendix Two—Core
Confusing Words.
(2)
As those who have read "The Shape of the
Future" know, the New Urban Region is
most closely analogous to the Consolidated
Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA) in the
United States or the Urban Agglomeration in the
European Union. Due to political pressure, the
official delineation of the CMSA is always a
decade or two behind reality. With the
introduction of “Micropolitian Areas”
following the 2000 Census, the situation has
become even more clouded.
There
is currently an ongoing search for a meaningful
name for coterminous collections of New Urban
Regions. A term proposed by staff at
the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech and
others for a multi-regional agglomerations is
“Megapolitian Area.” This is a new term for
areas such as the one that stretches from North
of Portland, Maine, to South of Hampton Roads,
Virginia. This area has been called
“BoWash” or “Megalopolis.” A similar
agglomeration stretches from East of Pittsburgh
to West of Milwaukee. There are now a dozen or
so of these areas in the United States. They are
where the vast majority of the nation state’s
citizens live and work.
New
Urban Regions are coterminous (that is they are
part of Megapolitian Areas by this or some other
name) or they are separated by Urban Support
Regions such as the DelMarVa Peninsula,
Appalachian or Northern Rocky Mountain Urban
Support Regions. An Urban Support Region
supplies agricultural, recreation, amenity, or
other goods and services to more than one New
Urban Region but does not have the internal
balance necessary to achieve sustainability. For
further articulation of this distinction see
"The Shape of the Future."
New
Urban Regions and Urban Support Regions are also
collected in subcontinental and continental
agglomerations such as the European Union,
NAFTA, etc. In the context of global competition
and trade the ability to achieve
“sustainability” at the New Urban Region
scale is not absolute. Unless threshold tests of
sustainability are debated and agreed to, global
urban agglomerations are an unintelligible
morass.
The
location of municipal, state and often
international borders have little to do with the
establishment of organic components of human
settlement which depend on economic, social and
physical parameters.
(3)
Somewhat more self-sufficient Balanced
Communities are the largest urban components of
Urban Support Regions. If the urban
agglomeration becomes large enough to achieve
balance, all or part of the Urban Support Region
would become a small New Urban Region.
(4)
The fact that the historical functions of
organic components are still hard wired into
human actions is the most important
understanding with respect to the organic
structure of human settlement patterns. The
earliest physical arrangements to support social
and economic human activities remain important.
The family (unit), the extended family
(dooryard), the multi-family grouping (cluster),
the clan (neighborhood) and the tribe (village)
all continue to have a function in contemporary
urban life. For a further exploration of these
relationships see "The Shape of the
Future," especially Chapter 8.
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