COMMUNITY CORNER GUEST SUBMISSION
How Would You Like to Grow?
A look into how traditional neighborhood developments turn your town into a home
Smart Growth and Traditional Neighborhood Development. Photo Credit: Dover, Kohl & Associates
By Raven Halle
something different from the traditional ideas of suburbia; Developing cities often find where mixed-use fosters conthemselves having to answer nections through an emphathe question, “how should sis on the pedestrian, other we continue to grow?” Due single-use developments to developmental pressures, may rely on vehicular modes not growing at all is rarely of transportation to create an option; in turn, places face the same. but often lesser a choice between growing connections. Again, in tradithrough implementing the tional neighborhoods, “life principles of conventional takes place on foot:” while suburban development and your children walk to school, the principles of traditional you can walk to the grocery neighborhood development. store; step out of your apartIn a few words, and in favor ment building’s elevator and of the latter, the traditional be immediately between the neighborhood developments wine bar and the dance stuare perhaps best captured by dio; go to your dental aparchitect Jan Gehl’s statement pointment and then the eye that “life takes place on foot.” doctor across the street; walk Traditional neighborhood de- your mother from the assistvelopments, which are often ed-living facility to the pool unique to their location and for a summer’s day swim. serve as prototypes for othThis is what it means to be a er traditional neighborhood walkable place; to be a town. developments, are displays of what residential areas First, let’s go back around can become when the focus 80 years to life in America is placed on people rather after World War II. During than on industry. The key to this period, things such as understanding the influence the GI Bill, the baby boom, of traditional neighborhood the increased affordability of developments lies in their automobiles, and the largeidentity as mixed-use develscale housing projects built opments, meaning that they on the outskirts of existing are a blend of the residential, cities contributed to what we the commercial, and the encall “urban sprawl,” or the vironmental. This mixed-use migration of folks from big approach to planning offers cities to single-family homes
Conventional Suburban Development. Photo Credit: Dover, Kohl & Associates
often separated by roads, landscaping, and long expanses of land. These 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 generation who had recently survived two world wars and the Great Depression. So, after the war, the industries which had mobilized the Allied victory turned their focus inward to propel the previously mentioned and eventual causes of urban sprawl. Among the many detriments to come from this—like the loss of agricultural lands, an increase in distance between home, work, and leisure places, and an increase in pollution due to distance—is wthe loss of a sense of place, or, as coined by James Howard Kunstler, “the geography of nowhere.” This is, in the last 20 years, perhaps what traditional neighborhood developments have most sought to change: turning “nowhere” into “somewhere.” And they
have done just that. To create an analogy, creating a town to planners is like making a cake to bakers. Suburbia has the ingredients: people, houses, sometimes community centers, cars, and roads which lead the cars out of the neighborhood to a desired destination—work, school, the grocery store, church, piano lessons. To bakers, this is the equivalent of eggs, butter, flour, sugar, and utensils lined up on the table. But to bake a cake, the ingredients must be more than present—they must be mixed. So, too, do the ingredients of the suburbs need to be combined to create a town. In the simplest of terms, this comparison displays the difference between a conventional suburban development and a traditional neighborhood development. When people, houses, businesses, schools, roads, and parks are integrated—the “mixed” in “mixed-use—” a town is born. This is the creation of “somewhere,” a place not isolated by gates or roads but open and accessible to all. Cont. on next page...
