In the news, as high gas prices and far-reaching suburbs are costing its residents more to drive from point to point, many people are taking inventory on the places they live, looking for close-to-home solutions that make shopping, working, and living more proximal. There are health, environmental, and social nuances of walk-able communities that are distinctly different than its counterpart of suburban sprawl.
As both urban and suburban leaders seek solutions to creating more walk-able communities, everything from richer mass transit to increased neighborhood commerce is being considered to meet its residents’ basic needs. Whole universities are cropping up with formal disciplines in New Urbanism as new ideas (which are actually quite traditional) are implemented and movements such as the Congress for the New Urbanism are widely embraced by civic decision-makers.
Some of the characteristics of walk-able communities include:
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town centers – a quiet, pleasant main street with a set of hearty, healthy stores
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areas designed for people first, cars second
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neighborhoods with mixed income and mixed-use housing
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safe, adequate and appealing public space for people to gather and to sit
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easy access for people of all ages and abilities
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main streets that are speed-controlled and interconnected, or laid out in a grid
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many people walking
A few online links that with recent news and advocacy here:
- USA Today, 7/29/08__”Gas prices drive push to reinvent America’s suburbs” http://m.usatoday.com/detail.jsp?key=876570&rc=na_ne&p=1
- CNN 6/16/08_”Is America’s suburban dream collapsing into a nightmare?”
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/06/16/suburb.city/index.html - “Walkable Communities/New Urbanism” Washington State magazine Feb. 2008 (institution)
http://wsm.wsu.edu/stories/2008/February/newurbanism.html - Understanding Walk-able Communities (blog)
http://www.walkable.org/article1.htm - Washington State’s Futurewise (social concern) http://futurewise.org/
>Touting the environmental benefits of a community of 90% vacation/second homes is rather deplorable.
A resident’s roundtrip drive to the coast is negating any benefits of Seabrook’s “walk-able community”.
Wouldn’t you think?
>Thank you for your question. It opens the door to a great discussion regarding land use and the interconnected relationships that make Seabrook a model for walk-ability and sustainable design.
Across the centuries, people have chosen vacation destinations in which to leisure. The act of “getting away” for a vacation does require one to leave their immediate place of residence. Inherently, the most revered places inspire us to think differently about the places we spend most of our time. And they have to be extraordinary.
This is an incredibly important time in America. The great Baby-Boom generation has already begun to retire. As America negotiates this paradigm shift, the realism is that the larger development community will not ignore the demand for second homes. Some will be absorbed by retiring Boomers, some will be purchased by their children with the intent of having a vacation “legacy home” to hand down to their own children. By default, these homes exist in places of great natural beauty (i.e. places near rivers, lakes, streams, oceans, mountains, etc.),
One could accept the status quo development pattern of the 1950’s and beyond (which places emphasis of driving to vacation destinations that still require you to use your car once you are there) or one could embrace communities (like Seabrook) that offer alternative modes of movement (i.e. pedestrian, bicycles, etc.) by creating a smaller development footprint and by providing the day-to-day needs that can and will be found eventually on a Main Street of businesses. (like in Europe, or in places here in America: Cannon Beach, OR, Seaside, FL, Carmel, CA, Nantucket, MA, The Adirondacks, NY, etc). One of the best case study examples of a new beach town is Seaside, FL. It has had national and international implications of proving that new development can be sustainable while still meeting modern day demands for an expanding population.
When Robert Davis (Seaside, FL developer) and Duany, Plater-Zyberk (www.dpz.com) (Town Planners of Seaside) were planning Seaside, Florida they hired Leon Krier, a London-based architectural theorist, as a consultant. In Krier’s writings he proposes that the ideal size for a small town, or city quarter, is eighty acres. Eighty acres encompasses an area with a quarter-mile radius, which happens to be the distance that a healthy person would be willing to walk on a routine basis to go to work, shop, or go out to eat. At the time, Seaside was largely a demonstrative project for Davis and DPZ as they purported to exemplify to lawmakers that current urban design regulations nullified urban planning which respected the human scale and the complexity of human needs. Another great link to better understand this town planning concept and how it is beginning to change the way we think about our built environment again can be learned at: http://www.cnu.org/charter