Fair Trade Placemaking: Are you being compensated for your choices?

Over a decade ago Andrés Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost.

Tony Nelessen, the inventor of the Visual Preference Survey, confirmed this lesson a few years later when he came to my town and conducted one. 

Measure Local, Share Global, Part 2: From app to main course

Talk about geek love!

When I wrote recently about having cooked up an iPhone app for collecting the physical metrics behind form-based codes, my intentions were pretty modest. First, I was just kind of giddy over how it was coming together and wanted to talk about it. But second, and more importantly, I wanted to get the idea out there and let the swarm take a crack at it, as a true, open-source initiative.

Gettin’ Paid: Placemaking and the Importance of Compensation

Over a decade ago Andres Duany of DPZ taught me that, more times than not, NIMBY opposition stems from a sense that proposed development is not of equal or greater value to what would be lost.

Tony Nelessen, the inventor of the Visual Preference Survey, confirmed this lesson a few years later when he came to my town and conducted one. 

Dancing with Urban Agriculture

My lovely wife of eight years enjoys really bad television. For better or worse, last night she tricked me into watching a segment of ‘Dancing with the Stars.’ Coyly, she asked me to name the movies in which the dancing ‘star’ had ‘starred’.

Having no idea and starting my way back upstairs, I heard her mimicking quietly, “Bueller… Bueller…?

Today’s “Eco-Warriors”: Giving Them Something Worth Fighting For

This week I’d like to share a few thoughts on infill and sustainability that coalesced while preparing this week for another Pecha Kucha presentation on Retrofitting Suburbia.

I’ll begin with a little background. My daughter came home from her International Baccalaureate Elementary School with a new sticker in her daily planner proclaiming her an “Eco-Warrior!”

Back to the Farm (And to the Bunker)

Just when reporters were beginning to buy into the hopefulness of “sprawl repair” and “ag is the new golf,” Andres Duany trips them up with visions of the dark side. Or at least the really hard side, as in the hard work ahead if we’re to reverse the direction of 20th century excesses.

“Our wealth as a nation allowed us to become stupid in planning and we separated everything – residential areas, commercial, industrial,” Duany told an Oregon audience May 12. “Our wealth allowed us to do that for 50 years – but those days are over.”

Everything’s Connected: Health, Healthy Aging, Community Design

Among the most encouraging trends in Smart Growth is an emerging consensus that good community design can address a bunch of issues at once. Which makes for much more comprehensive, cost-effective strategies to match the complexity of challenges before policy-makers.

Take, for instance, the agendas of separate entities concentrating exclusively on topics such as public health, environmental protection, energy conservation, and aging issues. Just in the last few months:

• The Environmental Protection Agency has published “a guide to Smart Growth and Active Aging” called Growing Smarter, Living Healthier );
• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has its own Healthy Community Design Initiative, will lend its name and expertise to the 18th national gathering of the Congress for the New Urbanism in Atlanta next May (more about that in a separate post);
• And the U.S. Climate Change Science Program published an “Analysis of the Effects of Global Change on Human Health and Welfare and Human Systems.”

Those of us who fall under the category of “aging Boomers” are going to be particularly interested in how this confluence affects both our personal and professional lives. Thankfully, healthy aging is becoming an increasingly hot topic and seems likely to offer some of the most immediate opportunities for unifying strategies.

In blog posts below, we’ve reported on how senior co-housing might fit into planning for New Urbanist TNDs and infill. And we talked about DPZ’s landmark Lifelong Communities Charrette for the Atlanta Regional Commission here and here.

The complete report from the DPZ/ARC effort in Atlanta is now up on the ARC’s website, and it’s a must-see for planners and municipalities concerned about how to work aging-in-place planning into other goals – such as retrofitting dead malls and creating infill TODs. Check it out here.

With this convergence of Big Ideas gaining momentum, what’s the next step? Scaling up. The bad news in this good news/bad news scenario is that the challenges of demographics, energy depletion, and climate change are bigger than any effort to confront them so far. Listen particularly to the ARC’s Kathryn Lawler in the video below, as she joins other presenters from a recent Healthy Aging conference in Chapel Hill, NC.

— Ben Brown

DPZ Promotes Mall Makeovers

Firm Suggests Model Legislation in Florida

Will Florida put the “suburban retrofitting” movement on the fast track?

Making it easier to do something about this.

Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) is providing state officials with a legislative template to do just that. On April 20, the Miami-based design and planning firm submitted to Florida’s Division of Community Assistance a suggested draft for a State of Florida Sprawl Repair Act. It’s intent: To enable, among other things, “the retrofit of shopping malls and shopping centers into dense, walkable, mixed-use town centers.”

In an appendix, the document even provides a list of 48 enclosed shopping malls that may be ripe for retrofitting. The effort, says DPZ principal Galina Tahchieva,  “is about stirring ideas about how to incentivize the private sector through easier permitting and infrastructure funding.” And the hope, of course, is that other states embrace similar initiatives.

“The repair, retrofit, and repurposing of commercial nodes — these malls and shopping centers — should be the first in a number of sprawl interventions,” says Tahchieva. That’s because they promise maximum bang for the investment buck.

“These nodes command the largest monetary and real estate investments in suburbia, and in most cases, they’re still under single ownership,” she says. What’s more, if dead or dying malls are redeveloped and intensified as complete town centers with residential and office components to supplement the retail, “transit between these intensified nodes will then start making sense.”

The next target, says Tahchieva, “should be the failing residential subdivisions.  The choices are: evolution into mixed use neighborhoods, if they are lucky with location and have potential for intensification and leadership, or devolution, abandonment or conversion to park or agricultural land. The future growth of Florida is dependent on such actions.”

Tahchieva headed a DPZ design team that, during a February charrette in Atlanta, explored design alternatives for an out-of-date mall in the city’s northern ‘burbs. See our coverage here.

The broader retrofitting initiative is already influencing form-based coding efforts. The Center for Applied Transect Studies is working on a SmartCode module for suburban retrofitting – and, incidentally, for the emerging “agricultural urbanism” movement. See CATS’s new modules here.

— Ben Brown