Bacon's Rebellion

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA–Leon Krier, one of the world’s leading neo-traditional architects and urban planners, finds a lot to be unhappy about what planners, architects and developers are building these days. He dislikes high-rises and skyscrapers, which he views as affronts to human scale. He detests modernist architecture, which, by sacrificing traditional forms and proportions, fills the landscape with kitsch. He loathes the use of synthetic materials, which replace natural materials rooted in local environments and cultural traditions. Vast swaths of the built environment are not only ugly and inhuman but they are built upon a foundation of the fossil-fuel economy that will collapse sooner or later.

“We have created problems for which there is no human resolution,” said Krier this morning in a keynote address to the Congress for the New Urbanism. “There is a love story and religious respect for hyper-scale. … These things are unstoppable and unreformable.”

Krier provided a pessimistic note in an otherwise forward-looking and up-beat conference. Many of his comments presupposed the audience’s familiarity with ongoing debates and schisms in the architecture/planning field and, for rustics such as myself, called out for more context. Much of his address was unbloggable.

However, one theme did emerge that I find worth illuminating. It is Krier dogma that buildings should be built to a human scale. “If I were dictator,” he said, “I would dictate that no building be more than three floors high.” Invariably, people would figure out how to get around the dictator’s rules and maybe build to four or five stories, which would be fine.

He views skyscrapers and high-rises as “vertical cul de sacs,” as egregious as the horizontal dead ends of suburbia. Skyscrapers isolate people in their buildings and limit human interaction. People arrive in cars, park in underground parking lots and ride elevators to their offices. Then they leave the same way. The streets at ground level are often empty of people.

The genius of the development style in traditional European cities — he didn’t say this, but I’m extrapolating here and drawing upon Richard Florida (see previous post) — is that they achieved a density and design that optimized human interaction. Humans are social creatures and they crave interaction, so Krier’s optimal density satisfies basic human needs. Also, the often-random encounters that occur on city streets spark new ideas that lead to innovation. Finally (borrowing from urbanist Jane Jacobs) Krier’s optimal density puts more “eyes on the street,” which reduces crime and other anti-social behavior.

Thus, if I am reading Krier correctly based on his remarks, there is an optimal level of density somewhere between what we see in American suburbs and what we find in Manhattan. To maximize peoples’ satisfaction with their surroundings and spur creativity and innovation, we should strive to build communities that achieve that optimal level of density.

— JAB

by James A. Bacon

WEST PALM BEACH, FLA–Since its genesis three decades or so ago, the New Urbanism movement looked to the 1920s as the golden era of urban development in the United States. City builders had adapted to the rise of the automobile as dominant transportation mode while retaining continuity with previous urban forms that emphasized walkability and human scale. But the time has come to look to a different era for inspiration, the 1870s, says Andres Duany, one of New Urbanism’s founders and intellectual leaders.

Planners, developers and designers need to adjust to the new age of economic austerity, said Duany at a plenary session of the 2012 Congress for the New Urbanism this morning. America needs to embrace “lean” development, a concept that encompasses both “green” building and sustainability and economic efficiency. New Urbanists need to create business models that allow development to occur incrementally and on a smaller scale without mega-millions in hard-to-get project financing. “The new economy is about doing things economically.”

“By our wits, we colonized a continent” in the second half of the 19th century, said Duany. Somehow, Americans managed to do it without a Department of Housing and Urban Development and without banks that bankrolled massive real estate deals. Somehow, Americans housed tens of millions of immigrants and laid out some of the country’s great cities, from Oklahoma City to Portland “out of nowhere” — cities that created so much wealth that they could support opera houses and universities.

The masters of the system, said Duany, were the Mormons. Between 1855 and 1905 they laid out 534 towns and cities, from Salt Lake City to San Diego. The Mormons were so poor then they they couldn’t afford Conestoga wagons. Yet they were brilliant managers. Not one of their towns failed. One Mormon secret was the large city block, one of the most flexible constructs in America. These urban units could be cut up into villages or they could accommodate an entire university. They were supremely adaptable and capable of evolving to meet new conditions.

In new projects he is working on, Duany said, he is looking for ways to bring down costs. Previous New Urbanism design tropes from the 1920s, such as mixed uses within a single building (retail on the ground floor, residential on the second and third floors) often are too expensive for the current economic environment. One solution is to achieve mixed use horizontally — placing flatter buildings with different uses adjacent to one another.

In other remarks, Duany defended the New Urbanism Smart Code, an open-source template for urban design originally developed by his firm, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, as an alternative to traditional zoning codes. He does not hold up the Smart Code as a universal prescription. But the country needs an alternative to the traditional zoning codes that are largely responsible for the phenomenon of suburban sprawl.

‘The default setting in America is to have a code,” Duany said. But the dominant code built around segregated land uses leads to “kitsch.” It is dysfunctional. And efforts to circumvent its rigidities, such as handing over decisions to “aesthetic committees,” can lead to arbitrary decision making. “I would rather know what the rules are than be subject to the opinions” of such committees, he said. Moreover, the United States has 27,000 planning departments. They aren’t going away. The Smart Code provides them an alternative set of rules to apply.

However, Duany acknowledged that there needs to be “code free” zones, or at least zones free from the strictures of the Smart Code. Thirty percent to 40% of the population doesn’t want to live in compact, walkable, mixed-use communities, and they shouldn’t be made to. The core principle, he said, is to give people a choice.