SEPTEMBER 2020
LIVE
VOLUME 1 EDITION 2
How Would You Like to Grow? A look into how traditional neighborhood developments turn your town into a home
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LEARN Smart Growth and Traditional Neighborhood Development. Photo Credit: Dover, Kohl & Associates
By Raven Halle
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residential areas can become when the focus is Developing cities ofplaced on people rather ten find themselves than on industry. The having to answer the key to understanding question, “how should the influence of tradiwe continue to grow?” tional neighborhood Due to developmental developments lies in pressures, not growtheir identity as mixeding at all is rarely an use developments, option; in turn, places meaning that they are a face a choice between blend of the residential, growing through imple- the commercial, and menting the principles the environmental. This of conventional suburmixed-use approach to ban development and planning offers somethe principles of tradithing different from tional neighborhood the traditional ideas development. In a few of suburbia; where words, and in favor of mixed-use fosters conthe latter, the traditional nections through an neighborhood develop- emphasis on the pedesments are perhaps best trian, other single-use captured by architect developments may rely Jan Gehl’s statement on vehicular modes of that “life takes place on transportation to create foot.” Traditional neigh- the same. but often lessborhood developments, er connections. Again, which are often unique in traditional neighborto their location and hoods, “life takes place serve as prototypes for on foot:” while your other traditional neigh- children walk to school, borhood developments, you can walk to the groare displays of what cery store; step out of
Conventional Suburban Development. Photo Credit: Dover, Kohl & Associates
your apartment building’s elevator and be immediately between the wine bar and the dance studio; go to your dental appointment and then the eye doctor across the street; walk your mother from the assisted-living facility to the pool for a summer’s day swim. This is what it means to be a walkable place; to be a town.
ideas might conjure within us the iconic rhetoric of the “American Dream,” or the notion of 2.5 children, a pet, and a picket-fence. While this long-surviving concept was first an item of praise and then a sign of conformity, early suburbia’s promise of a cookie-cutter life personified a sort of affluence that became highly attractive to the First, let’s go back generation who had around 80 years to life recently survived two in America after World world wars and the War II. During this peGreat Depression. So, riod, things such as the after the war, the indusGI Bill, the baby boom, tries which had mobithe increased affordabil- lized the Allied victoity of automobiles, and ry turned their focus the large-scale housing inward to propel the projects built on the previously mentioned outskirts of existing cit- and eventual causes of ies contributed to what urban sprawl. we call “urban sprawl,” or the migration of folks from big cities to single-family homes often separated by roads, landscaping, and long expanses of land. These Cont. on page 11...
