City Building: Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century

City Building Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century John Lund Kriken, FAIA, AICP With Philip Enquist, FAIA, and Richard Rapaport Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Contents ix

Foreword, Philip Enquist

xi

Preface, John Lund Kriken

Part I: An Introduction to City Building 1 4 9 14

The Millennial City The Missing Elements of City Design A Brief (and Personal) History of Urban Design Theory and Practice The Role of Design in Today’s City Building

Part II: Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building 27

Introduction

28

Principle One: Sustainability

50

Committing to an Environmental Ethic 1.1. Creating a Framework for Sustainable Settlement 1.2. Choosing the Right Future 1.3. Expanding a City/Sustaining Green 1.4. Guiding a Nation to a Post-Petroleum Future

56

Principle Two: Accessibility

32 37 44

83

Facilitating Ease of Movement 2.1. Locating Corridors to Preserve a Downtown 2.2. Creating Essential Access to Major Development 2.3. Planning for Ferry Transit 2.4. Learning from Mistakes: Mixed-Access Streets versus Transit Malls 2.5. Unblocking Movement 2.6. Restoring Access, Reversing Vacancy and Decline

88

Principle Three: Diversity

63 66 71 76 80

93 96 101 104 108

Maintaining Variety and Choice 3.1. Bringing Diversity to the Capitol 3.2. Designing Diversity into City Expansion 3.3. Creating Variety within Uniform Residential Regulations 3.4. Identifying the Special Qualities of a Place 3.5. Building-in Diversity

112

Principle Four: Open Space

130

Regenerating Natural Systems to Make Cities Green 4.1. Greening the World’s Densest City 4.2. Unpaving a River 4.3. Topping Off the Burnham Plan with a Green Roof 4.4. Developing a Public Greenbelt and Shoreline

134

Principle Five: Compatibility

118 121 125

149

Maintaining Harmony and Balance 5.1. Protecting Heritage While Creating Identity 5.2. Protecting Heritage While Managing Density 5.3. Retaining a Rural Landscape 5.4. Reviving Block Patterns and Building Types

152

Principle Six: Incentives

140 144 147

164

Renewing Declining Cities/Rebuilding Brownfields 6.1. Restoring a River (and Regenerating a City) 6.2. Rebuilding Downtowns in a Suburban Context: Good Intentions Get Snagged 6.3. Incentivizing a Brownfield

168

Principle Seven: Adaptability

156 161

190

Facilitating “Wholeness” and Positive Change 7.1. Planning for Continuous Change 7.2. Guiding and Anticipating Growth with Principles 7.3. Recovering a Diamond in the Rust (Belt) 7.4. Fitting Inside with Outside 7.5. Working toward a Flexible Campus

192

Principle Eight: Density

175 178 183 187

195 202 206

Designing Compact Cities with Appropriate Transit 8.1. Using Brown, Saving Green: Urban Density for Regional Renewal 8.2. Accepting Density and Height 8.3. Taking Advantage of Existing Infrastructure

210

219 225 230 234

Principle Nine: Identity

Creating/Preserving a Unique and Memorable Sense of Place 9.1. Developing Identity in Response to Climate 9.2. Responding to Climate and Culture 9.3. Creating a New Downtown Identity 9.4. Harnessing the Potential of the Waterfront

Part III: The City of the Future/The Future of the City

246

The City Is the Solution (Not the Problem) A New Urban Model A Developmental Moore’s Law Learning from Asia The Need for a Framework for Settlement Refocusing Planning Theory and Practice Rethinking Single-Purpose Design Education and Problem Solving A Call for National Plans Conclusion

247

Project Credits

254

Index

239 239 240 240 241 245 245 246

An Introduction to City Building

25

Part II: Nine Principles for TwentyFirst-Century City Building

Introduction Building successful twenty-first-century cities will require new modes of thought about growth, particularly as it relates to sustainability. This new thinking must be capable of encompassing and even transcending the kinds of technical problem solving explored in Part I. It will not be enough to simply throw around catchphrases like “green buildings,” “sustainable growth,” and “reduced carbon footprint.” Instead, planners and architects need to think in terms of active principles that assist in the ongoing task of designing rich, rewarding, transit-enabled, high-density cities, taking into account issues of air, water, vegetation, habitat, soil, and other essentials of sustainability.

It is also important to think about innovative city building in relation to historical and geographic factors, even those considered “long ago and far away” but that are nonetheless important in a city’s present and future life. During Hurricane Katrina, for example, the long-term destruction of barrier wetlands scores of miles downriver from New Orleans played a tragic role in the city’s flooding. In the development of Shanghai’s Chongming Island, for another example, planners recognized the need to preserve agriculture near a large city, even if farming might seem beyond the purview of the best-practice principles of urban design. Like it or not, the reach of the city and hence the requirements for city planning extend far into the regional, and even national, context.

What city builders thus need is a set of overarching principles that provoke thought about larger concerns fundamental to improving and ensuring the quality of urban life. Equally important, designers must preserve and enhance the natural environment that all cities inhabit.

These principles are basic to the process of persuasively communicating the need for city stakeholders to think about urban growth in terms of creating livable, sustainable places.

Part II presents nine principles of modern city building and offers projects that exemplify those principles, or in some cases do not. The principles were applied in a wide variety of planning modalities. They provided insights that helped move projects to consensus and completion. The statement of each principle includes a verb, such as “committing,” “renewing,” “maintainting,” or “facilitating,” that suggests the actions that need to be taken. The use of active verbs in the principles is not accidental. Exceptional city building must be an active and ongoing process.

Maps and Plans

Much can be learned from comparing maps and plans for regions, cities, neighborhoods, and individual projects. I illustrate the use of the principles described in Part II in a wide range of case studies, each one introduced within its city or region. Wherever possible, I present the case studies at the same scale, so that the relative sizes of parks, blocks, streets, districts, and neighborhoods can be compared.

Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building

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Principle One: Sustainability

Committing to an Environmental Ethic The Problem: Environmental exploitation and misuse, energy waste, degradation of land, and pollution of air and water.

Sustainability, the first principle of intelligent twenty-first-century city building, naturally underlies this book’s eight other principles. Broadly speaking, sustainability refers to the conservation and protection of irreplaceable and nonrenewable natural resources. The subject of sustainability is one of the alpha topics of our time, extensively discussed and written about, if not always comprehensively acted on. The ubiquity of the discussion is enough to suggest that city building in the twenty-first century will be largely governed by the requirement for sustainability. Over the next decades, the city-building profession will need to reckon with a finite supply of energy and with issues of global climate change. These facts mandate a powerful and ongoing commitment to an environmental ethic in urban design and planning. Two themes need to be addressed in dealing with the development of such an ethic: the natural environment and smart city building.

CITY BUILDING

28

The Natural Environment

In the new world of sustainable development, planners must begin by considering whether a project will consume irreplaceable lands: prime agricultural land, land that supports ecosystems affecting plant and animal life, and land with scenic qualities. Further, developers must carefully evaluate an area for its suitability, avoiding land subject to flooding, wildfires, storms, wind damage, and earthquakes. Water and air are fundamental to supporting population and, above virtually all other resources, need to be protected and conserved.

Protecting the water, air, and other elements of the natural environment is typically addressed through measuring environmental carrying capacity and land-use management.

Environmental Carrying Capacity

It has become a familiar practice for planners to study comparative data on air and water quality and quantity related to population growth and concomitant pollution. This relationship is useful in determining the development capacity within specific air basins and watersheds. It is a relationship that can change for the better over time. Through intelligent environmental stewardship, an area’s capacity to sustain population can increase while protecting desired air and water quality and quantity.

Land-Use Management

To avoid destructive natural hazards and to protect or regenerate irreplaceable lands, including wildlife habitats, animal migration corridors, riverfronts, watersheds, and high-quality agricultural lands, planners must consider new land zone designations. These will define where and under what conditions nondestructive urban development may take place and what lands must be protected.

Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building

29