The Citizen Planner
Real Towns for Real People
The Citizen Planner
Real Towns for Real People
The "New Urbanism" is not just for professionals or the wealthy. Citizens can take control of reshaping their communities and lives. Planner/developer Harrison Bright Rue explores the ills of our modern infrastructure and details how a new Florida program is training "citizen planners" to see and help to heal the places they live. (Reprinted from Terra Nova, MIT Press' Journal of Nature and Culture) |
Posted 6 March 1997
Readers' Comments added 31 December
1997
| We seem to have collectively forgotten the basic principles about how to design, build, and foster communities that work | It's all connected. People, families, businesses, towns, regions, countries, and natural systems don't function too well in isolation from one another. It's that simple and that complex. We've learned that lesson over and over in our studies of history, politics, economics, social systems, town planning, and the environment. As a builder/developer for twenty-something years, I've come to view such connections from the standpoint of urban design--the physical relationship of buildings, blocks, streets, parks, civic and commercial structures--coupled with their influence on social, economic, and natural systems. I believe average citizens and public officials can learn to look at their communities in a similar fashion and be motivated to act on this knowledge as well. |
| My own understanding of these relationships did not develop in a school of architecture. I learned what makes communities tick by living, working and playing in them, raising children and caring for parents, walking in the woods, vacationing in great places, renovating historic downtown buildings, and (reluctantly) driving out the strip to shop at the mall. I also learned about what threatens neighborhoods and communities as well as what we can do to strengthen them. | |
| That habit of looking at the built environment through a windshield has led our public decision-making processes for more than two generations. | These were hard-won lessons, picked up one at a time from personal observation and experience as a suburban-bred sixties' college dropout turned upstate New York homesteader; historic restoration contractor and project manager for national developers; community development consultant; and currently, a planner, teacher and affordable housing developer in Miami, Florida. |
| When I started to work with architects and town planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) in 1988, their interpretations of traditional urban design principles helped me see my community in new ways, and provided me with language to describe what I had previously known only intuitively. It inspired me to figure out what was broken in the system and to find a way to fix it. | |
Carver Homes, Dade County, Florida. |
Simply living with the daily consequences of sprawl can
equip people to understand how urban design affects their daily lives.
Time and again, I've seen average citizens "get" and embrace sophisticated
concepts far quicker than educated professionals stuck in the "way we've
always done it". Since my introduction to New Urbanism as project manager
of a New Town in Ithaca, NY in 1988, I've spent much of my career
explaining the movement's core principles to diverse groups. Obtaining
zoning approvals and funding for the Ithaca project required educating
local officials, bankers, builders, and neighborhood activists about many
of the problems I've discussed above as well as how historically based,
human-scaled design could generate comprehensive solutions. I've worked in
South Florida since 1992, helping neighborhood organizations, community
development corporations, church groups, and local governments to plan and
implement projects rooted in New Urbanist ideals. The repeated difficulty
of obtaining funding and approvals for creative development convinced me
of the need to teach non-professionals the basics of traditional urban
design.
That's where citizens, specialists seeking answers beyond their own field, or parents trying to make a place children can thrive come in. If I can learn to make sense of appropriate building siting, street widths & turning radii, street tree placement and sustainable building technology, identifying neighborhood centers and edges, maximizing scarce resources, and organizing and building consensus, then so can almost everyone. The task is a difficult one, however, as there are many obstacles to overcome. |
| Preserving the environment requires that we make our inner cities desirable and healthy places to live and work; spreading ever outward is both an ecologically and economically untenable solution | We might not have to overcome them all, though. If we jump far enough into the future and look back, many of today's obstacles might appear much smaller or even irrelevant. For instance, we wouldn't have to worry about where to put sewer pumping stations or how long large main pipes would last if we created a network of neighborhood-based, self-contained wetland habitat mini-treatment plants like the one John Todd designed to take care of the restrooms at the National Audubon Society's Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary near Immokalee, Florida. |
| Why am I choosing to talk about these issues from a deeply personal point of view--as a parent, an artist, someone who sees God's hand in nature--rather than maintaining the illusion of dispassionate intellectual discourse? Should I try to be objective and professional? Isn't that how we're supposed to make public policy decisions: research, study, analyze, report, recommend, follow the rules? | |
| We've handed over to professionals all the decisions about how and where our communities should grow and what they should look like | Perhaps that's a big part of the problem. We've handed over to professionals all the decisions about how and where our communities should grow and what they should look like. We're stuck living with the consequences. Our roads are designed by traffic engineers unconcerned with life on the streets or the economic health of a struggling downtown. Funders and developers of affordable housing concentrate on producing the most units for the least cost rather than helping to ensure a long-term affordable lifestyle for residents. Our own local governments join the Sprawl-Marts in their frontal assault on Main Street life by moving libraries, high schools, even town halls out of downtown. In an effort to maintain some mythical illusion of control over our built environment and to protect the natural one, we've constructed layer upon layer of competing agencies, conflicting regulations, and review processes that consume vast amounts of time and resources. |
| Unfortunately, all this effort--rulemaking, attempts to comply, public review & input, agency deliberations--still doesn't seem to tell concerned citizens what a new development will look like, how it will function, or what its impact will be on their daily lives and the local economy, much less on the environment. We seem to have collectively forgotten the basic principles about how to design, build, and foster communities that work. Although it would be simplistic to blame this state of affairs solely on auto-based suburban development patterns, the free and safe flow of auto traffic has dominated both urban and rural design standards, zoning regulations, and public investment policy since WWII. |
| the free and safe flow of auto traffic has dominated both urban and rural design standards, zoning regulations, and public investment policy since WWII | While brainstorming ideas for traditional urban design classes with Miami architect Elizabeth Guyton, I saw some instructive post-World War II advertising and government propaganda film clips that helped clarify how this suburban juggernaut got launched. The boys were coming back from the war, starting families late, and needed jobs and houses. American industry had geared up for a monumental effort to provide war material and needed to redirect that factory capacity and investment toward peacetime production. It probably didn't take the industrialists and politicians very long to conceive of converting tank factories into car production, building vast tracts of mass-produced houses, and creating nation-wide networks of new roads to link them all together. One old-timer told me that General Motors even paid the city to tear up the trolley tracks from Biscayne Boulevard, Miami's bayfront main street. |
| Although that inspired thinking generated jobs, we still needed to train others how to design and manage these new housing and transportation systems. The GI Bill sent lots of bright young people to college, where they learned new standards for roads (bigger, wider, faster, more) and up-to-date planning ideas that they wrote into zoning ordinances in their new jobs (enclaves of one type & size of house set apart from each other and the streets, separation of uses, using lots of words rather than drawings to describe and govern physical relationships). | |
| That habit of looking at the built environment through a windshield has led our public decision-making processes for more than two generations. It would be foolish to assume it would take less than another fifty to turn it around toward making sustainable places that work for people. | |
Spring Garden District alongside downtown Miami's
Wagner Creek. |
The good news is that we're some fifteen years into that
returning pendulum swing. A loose coalition of architects and urban
designers, developers and lawyers, even enlightened traffic engineers, has
been mounting a concerted attack on this status quo for at least that
long. Dubbed the New Urbanism, the movement's proponents believe that
building according to appropriate design standards can actually help cure
our wounded cities and towns while heading off further degradation of the
countryside. Although their design principles are thoroughly grounded in
an understanding of how towns were made historically, New Urbanists have
learned to take the best examples of great places from the past--Savannah,
Charleston, Annapolis, Alexandria, Key West, and the unconquered pieces of
thousands of other old towns--and combine them with planning for transit
systems, appropriately placed parking, streets scaled for both pedestrians
and drivers, redesigned shopping malls, and other modern standards.
These historical examples are usually local or culturally connected, and most regions still have places worth learning from. Duany & Plater-Zyberk's plan for the new town of Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was developed by visiting historic districts in nearby Annapolis and Alexandria, Virginia, among others. They and developer Joseph Alfandre measured street widths, curb radii (the size of the quarter-circle of curbing at a street intersection), distances between buildings, public spaces, and regional architecture. They also observed how such districts maintained their vitality for hundreds of years--careful planning, mix of building types and uses, defined neighborhoods, well-located public space, and enough character to make people willing to fight for their preservation. |
| New Urbanists have learned to take the best examples of great places from the past | Dover, Kohl & Partners' Hometown Plan for redeveloping the small city of South Miami, Florida (where they live and work), takes its cues from the town's historic development patterns: main street commercial and retail buildings built closely together next to the rail line; parking lots behind the stores with apartments above; awnings and arcades to shade both windows and pedestrians. Because downtown stores had lost business to the malls, homeowners' property taxes rose tremendously to make up for the lost sales tax income. The Bakery Center, a poorly designed downtown shopping mall that turned its back on the street, was virtually unoccupied. Concerned merchants and neighborhood groups enlisted Victor Dover and Joseph Kohl to create the new plan in an intensive participatory design workshop called a charrette. As a neighborhood resident at the time, I volunteered on the design team along with a wide range of interested citizens. |
| such districts maintained their vitality for hundreds of years | The resulting Hometown Plan achieved consensus on solutions to a wide range of problems. Lot-by-lot infill development on vacant or underused land was encouraged by removing or relaxing on-site parking requirements. Rather than tie up half of a small main street lot with parking (or worse yet, meet zoning requirements by putting the building on stilts over the parking lot), owners could pay into a fund to provide parking offsite. Further zoning incentives were developed to reduce required parking if the building was designed to mix uses--retail on the ground floor, offices on the second or third, apartments on the upper floors--because the spaces would be used at different times of the day or night. City officials also recognized that changing codes to encourage living above the stores would help provide "eyes on the street" at night, increasing public safety. |
| In return for such incentives, the new urban code required buildings to respectfully face the street, match the setbacks of existing structures, move parking to the rear, and conform to a lowered building height. A reasonable architectural code, governing materials and appearance, including window and door proportions and placement, was developed to help prevent mistakes like the Bakery Center from reappearing. Critics of such codes often cite "property rights" as an argument against coordinating how individual buildings are knit together to make a workable urban fabric. It's certainly the American way to resist being told what to do. However, if downtown shopping districts are going to remain successful, merchants need to look at how suburban malls work. Store owners happily accept very tight appearance and operating restrictions in a mall in return for predictability. Because everyone else accepts the same rules, they don't have to fear a pink neon decorated pie palace appealing next door. Customers come in droves because they know what to expect as well. | |
| careful application of locally developed, historically based architectural and urban codes can help stabilize and jump-start the redevelopment of downtown neighborhoods and business districts | Although I'm certainly not recommending turning our downtowns into malls, careful application of locally developed, historically based architectural and urban codes can help stabilize and jump-start the redevelopment of downtown neighborhoods and business districts. Once an area becomes somewhat blighted, potential investors take a greater risk because they're uncertain whether property values will go up or down. Because the neighborhood is in flux and existing zoning codes don't adequately govern what might get built or torn down next door or across the street, even fearless entrepreneurs are scared off. When a well-designed, understandable code is put in place, it provides the predictability needed to encourage investment. People can see what might get built because the rules actually control shape and appearance. |
| As in most cities, this expansion was heavily subsidized in the form of road and infrastructure improvements (water, sewer, drainage) paid for by all citizens and businesses | I've been watching these theories being demonstrated in West Palm Beach, Florida, as well. Designer John Nolen's 1923 plan focused on Clematis Street, at that time the city's transit hub. At the east end you could hop on the ferry across Lake Worth to Palm Beach. A ten-minute walk to the west end of Clematis brought you to the train station--the city's only connection to the outside world. Once the automobile came to town, US1 and I-95 sucked most traffic off the train; an auto bridge to Palm Beach changed the city's entrance and made the ferry obsolete. Suburban expansion westward towards the Everglades further dispersed the downtown's activity centers. As in most cities, this expansion was heavily subsidized in the form of road and infrastructure improvements (water, sewer, drainage) paid for by all citizens and businesses--even those who remained downtown. |
| In 1993, Mayor Nancy Graham hired Duany & Plater-Zyberk to prepare a downtown master plan linking existing improvement efforts. Recognizing that the health of the entire region depended on the viability of its historic and geographic center, the design team and charrette participants developed a regulating plan and urban code to govern and encourage redevelopment. Clematis Street's role as a downtown retail center was augmented by encouraging residential uses above the commercial first floor. Over the past two years, investors and building owners have taken the lead by converting existing office space into apartments, adding windows to create lofts over furniture stores, and providing customers for sidewalk cafes that stay open after the office workers leave downtown | |
Espanola Way in Miami Beach,
Florida. |
Creative redevelopment is not limited to historic downtowns,
as Cape Cod developers Buff Chase and Doug Storrs have proven in New
Seabury, Massachusetts. They took a well-located aging strip mall and
inserted several blocks of streets and new buildings around the existing
stores. The sixties' storefronts were renovated to match their new
surroundings; even the old asphalt from the parking lot was melted and
recycled to provide paving for the new streets. As in most small town
centers, convenient parking is provided on-street, behind stores, or in
parking garages. Their plan for the surrounding new community adds a
variety of housing types, public space, neighborhood stores, and sites for
future civic buildings within walking distance of the retrofitted mall.
Despite such redevelopment efforts, most coverage of New Urbanist issues has focused only on New Towns like Peter Calthorpe's Laguna West, in Sacramento, California, or the DPZ-designed Seaside on the Gulf Coast in Florida's Panhandle. The overwhelming media coverage of a beachfront resort town like Seaside has actually confused the issues somewhat. Most folks have a hard time connecting a community of pastel-painted, tin-roofed second homes to their own daily lives. |
| Developer Robert Davis initially set out to create a somewhat more modest community. Beginning lot prices were reasonable and the first houses were small Cracker-inspired bungalows. Regional architectural elements like tin roofs, wide eave overhangs, wrap-around porches, and ventilating towers were chosen as much for their energy efficiency as for their appearance or historic value. As Andres Duany is fond of pointing out, until we're regularly making thousands of great places to choose from, once you build one, its market value may increase rapidly. |
| Each neighborhood has its own identity; public and private spaces are clearly defined; civic and business functions are located in the center of the community | If you look carefully through the haze of attention, controversy, and somewhat artificial social and economic structure (mostly second homes), Seaside is a successful demonstration of many key New Urbanist principles. There is an urban and architectural code that actually says where buildings should be located, how they should relate to one another and the streets, and what they might look like. The code is strict but simple, fitting on two 24-by-36-inch drawings. Prospective homeowners find it easy to interpret, often working actively with their contractor or architect through the design process. Each neighborhood has its own identity; public and private spaces are clearly defined; civic and business functions are located in the center of the community. |
| The most overlooked lesson from Seaside is environmental: its delightfully dense urban plan keeps most buildings off the beach, preserving the dunes. Tight construction rules mandate that individual homes be built without damaging native vegetation beyond the building's footprint. The native vegetation becomes the landscaping, eliminating lawns and ornamental shrubs and their excessive water and chemical use. Most roads and paths are made with a permeable surface of crushed shells or brick, which helps slow down and clean stormwater runoff. | |
| society as a whole can't afford to turn its back on our existing cities and suburbs | Although New Towns are a much-needed alternative to business-as-usual suburban development patterns, most of us will not be able to afford to live in such enclaves, and society as a whole can't afford to turn its back on our existing cities and suburbs. Preserving the environment requires that we make our inner cities desirable and healthy places to live and work; spreading ever outward is both an ecologically and economically untenable solution. Even stunningly successful inner-city redevelopment will do little good if there is no clean water to drink. Sprawl-based development has surrounded our cities with socially sterile suburbs entirely dependent on a mode of transport that might be obsolete within my own lifetime; their low density precludes creating workable alternative transit systems. |
| Despite our awareness of the importance of such connections, most of the decisions that affect our daily lives are still made from within the narrow viewpoint and mandates of a specific discipline, such as engineering, education, social work, or housing development. These decisions are not made by bad people; we've just educated specialists to look at issues from a tightly defined point of view and put them to work in a system that artificially divides problems into "controllable" units with illusory solutions: | |
| Our road and transit systems are designed in absolute, unquestioned reverence of the automobile | Our road and transit systems are designed in absolute, unquestioned reverence of the automobile by well-intentioned professionals whose self-defined mission is the free and rapid flow of auto traffic. The safety of drivers transcends that of pedestrians or the overall health of the community, the local economy, and the environment. The Florida Department of Transportation (DOT), like most State DOT's, considers it a significant "improvement" to widen the main street of a small town like Belle Glade into six oversize lanes, remove trees and eliminate on-street parking. Their engineers see no connection between the resulting excessive speed and families having to drive five blocks to church because they are afraid to cross Main Street on foot. |
| Because funding is limited, affordable housing developments are often sited on (initially) cheaper outlying or leftover land, far from transit, shopping, jobs, schools or services. Designs are often recycled from the developer's previous project without consideration of neighborhood or environmental context. | |
Hillsboro Canal near crossing with Main Street, Belle
Glade, Florida. |
Our social support systems are broken into fragments that
address individual symptoms one at a time, often with little communication
or interaction between components. A sixteen-year-old single mother can be
thrown onto the streets by an abusive parent, while her case manager is
left frustrated and impotent to redirect or stop the meager monthly flow
of housing, food, & medical assistance still sent in her name to her
parents by disconnected governmental units.
Sprawl-base development patterns are directly subsidized by inner-city residents and businesses because the true initial and long-term operating costs of such development is not disclosed or considered in the planning, funding, and decision-making process. James E. Frank's study of Tallahassee neighborhoods calculated that the cost of providing sewer hook-ups in inner-city neighborhoods was $4,447, while it cost up to $11,443 to install the same service for wealthy neighborhoods in the suburban fringe. Even with a measurable difference in cost, everyone pays the same fee for sewer connections (around $6,000), no matter where they live. Inner-city residents and businesses provide similar subsidies for roads, mail, even Fed-Ex and UPS service, all of which charge equal user fees. Frank's study also noted that new houses on the outskirts of Tallahassee cost taxpayers as much as $10,000 each for road improvements, versus $571 per household for improvements serving close-in neighborhoods. Of course, this added cost does not include ongoing maintenance or replacement. |
| Taxpayers subsidize sprawling development | Investment in public facilities--office buildings, schools, maintenance buildings, parking garages, pumping stations--is usually made by a single agency, considering only their own budget, needs, and users. We don't look at overall public needs and costs or true environmental impact. More importantly, we miss the opportunity to make each public investment part of the solution rather than part of the problem. A recent state office building was built on the far outskirts of Tallahassee, Florida's state capital, solely because land was cheaper. Agency officials were surprised to learn when the building was completed that the city bus system did not extend that far and had no plans to extend service in the future. |
| Neighborhood and environmental activists are so frustrated with their inability to have effective input into public land-use decisions that they have gone beyond NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) to BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone). Even locally beneficial and necessary projects are often stopped. | |
| Most public agricultural subsidies go to large corporate farms that use disproportionate resources to grow and transport single crops, often have severe effects on the regional environment, and value costly machines over local labor. Small, diversified family farms near cities not only don't qualify for most subsidies, but are actually threatened by the taxation and zoning policies of their sprawling customer base. | |
| Because it is easier to get new developments approved in stand-alone pieces of a few hundred units of the same housing type, public space is either ignored or relegated to a piece of unusable left-over land. The disadvantage of building neighborhoods without centers was tragically apparent here in South Dade County, Florida after Hurricane Andrew. Not only did "condo-burbia" residents have no idea where to gather for assistance immediately after the storm (the mini-mart?), the relief efforts were hampered because there were few visible targets toward which to direct help: town squares, village greens, or plazas. | |
| Developers build in lowlands which flood and must then be "rescued" at public expense | Our public works agencies are still locked into quick-fix approaches to environmental problems. South Florida's Everglades are a unique natural system perfected over tens of thousands of years, yet engineers continue to believe we can experiment with constructed improvements with impunity. When developers are allowed to build in low-lying swampland, residents are infuriated as neighborhoods continue to flood. The public is then expected to build and maintain expensive pumping and piping systems to keep them dry. Meanwhile, recharge of the aquifer (natural underground water storage) is drastically reduced, leading engineers to consider future desalinization plants to provide bad-tasting drinking water at five times the cost--in a climate with more than sixty inches of rain per year. |
| Public investment decisions continue to be made by individual agencies to address separate needs when a comprehensive approach might uncover solutions to multiple problems for the same or less money. Although most local codes inhibit such coordination by requiring individual projects to meet all needs on-site, parking lots can be shared by facilities that use them at different times of the day or week, like churches or schools. A well-designed and usable neighborhood park can be created by coordinating the site planning and design for an affordable housing project, a senior citizen's center, a library, and a daycare center or group home. | |
| How can the average citizen help to change this fractured, wasteful and ineffective system? | How can we change this fractured, wasteful, and ineffective system? How can average citizens influence their community's growth and health? How can they learn to understand, value, celebrate, and protect the rich diversity of cultural, geographic, historic, environmental, and economic resources that make up even an "average" neighborhood? How can non-professionals gather the technical information, community support, and political power necessary to negotiate viable alternatives to business-as-usual development patterns? How can creative change agents laboring within outmoded bureaucratic systems obtain the ammunition they need to change policies and procedures? |
| I found the framework and platform for developing such an education effort when offered a part-time job coordinating the Owner-Builder Center at Miami-Dade Community College in downtown Miami, Florida. The Center has historically taught construction skills to homeowners in short hands-on courses. I reasoned that in much the same way that owner-builders could take carpentry or plumbing courses to gain the skills and confidence needed to repair their own homes, individual concerned citizens could learn the skills required to work effectively in their own neighborhoods. | |
Carver Homes public housing,
Miami. |
The resulting Citizen-Planner Program was inaugurated in the
fall of 1995 to help average citizens and public officials look at their
communities in new ways. The classes focus on the physical design of our
neighborhoods, buildings, parks, streets, and public places, and the
environmental, social, economic and cultural issues with which they are
inextricably linked. Although the subject matter is often complicated, I
try to cut through technical jargon and communicate in a common-sense
approach that is understandable to non-professionals. Because Miami is
home to scores of talented urban designers (most of them graduates of the
Master's Program in Suburb and Town Design led by Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk
at the University of Miami) I was able to enlist as co-teachers and guest
instructors architects such as Victor Dover, Joseph Kohl, Derrick Smith,
and Daniel Williams. Elizabeth Guyton was particularly helpful in
developing the initial courses.
The curriculum is divided into courses that last for four sessions, requiring minimal commitment from busy individuals. They follow each other in sequence, however, a student who wants to explore the issues in depth can take a twelve-week series. Course material includes approximately 60% traditional urban design principles and 40% techniques and strategies for getting things done: informal research (interviewing neighbors, identifying and measuring particularly well or poorly designed streets, collecting local maps and history), community organizing, running effective (consensus-based) meetings, conducting a design charrette, identifying available resources, and implementing a model project. |
| "Center and Edge" explores what makes a great neighborhood and how neighborhoods can be made to function better over time, using local and historical examples from different cultures. Every good neighborhood has both a center (a physical focal point for community activities) and edge (geographic or perceived boundaries); a wide mix of uses (residential, small commercial and retail, recreation, education, civic) and building types; and a well connected network of streets and transportation alternatives. | |
| "Dancing in the Streets" | "Dancing in the Streets" looks in detail at what makes a street work and why some are comfortable and full of activity, whereas others are barren and lifeless. A great street is more than the means to move cars efficiently. It can be a pleasant and safe place to walk and beautiful to look at while adding value to residents' homes and helping to knit the neighborhood fabric together. Topics include pavement width (two ten-foot lanes are sufficient for neighborhood residential streets, whereas wider roads should have a median so pedestrians can cross in safety), sidewalk design and location (wide enough for outdoor dining in a commercial district, Five feet wide and set back from the curb in a residential district), curb radii (five to fifteen-feet radius, rather than the twenty-five to thirty-five feet favored by traffic engineers and truckers--the larger radius both increases the distance pedestrians have to cross at intersections and increases the speed of traffic around corners), street tree selection and location (shady, non-invasive native species, planted between curb and sidewalk to shield pedestrians from traffic), public space (multiple users, centrally located, and supervised by activities in nearby buildings), and the relationships between buildings, people, and streets (buildings and streets combining to create "outdoor rooms" that make pedestrians feel comfortable and safe). |
| "Creative Housing Design" | "Creative Housing Design" introduces innovative design and planning that can help to create a long-term affordable lifestyle for residents: accessibility to transportation, schools, work, and shopping; functional unit design; durable, sustainable, energy-efficient construction; integration into the surrounding community; site planning and amenities that foster cooperation. We also discuss how public policy, zoning, and financing regulations unintentionally conspire to inhibit creative solutions, usually focusing on providing the most units for the lowest initial cost. |
| "Regional Context" | "Regional Context", co-taught by architect and environmental planner Daniel Williams, looks at how we might reach a sustainable balance between healthy natural systems and human needs and desires. We discuss environmental and quality-of-life problems associated with rampant urban sprawl and propose alternative development patterns and infrastructure systems to deal with drainage, water supply, and transit needs. For instance, rather than installing expensive underground drainage structures and pump stations, natural drainage systems can be created to slow and clean storm water runoff, allow recharge of drinking water supplies, and double as neighborhood parks. |
| ...reaching a sustainable balance... | "Planning Public Facilities" explores how good physical design at a neighborhood level, coupled with cooperative relationships among funders, regulators, local government, service agencies, and private developers, can stretch our investments while creating better places. One good example is a cooperative planning effort in South Miami Heights' Caribbean School neighborhood, led by architects Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Suzanne Martinson, which included a neighborhood full-service school, affordable and market-rate housing, a senior citizens' home, daycare, special needs facilities, and public park and infrastructure improvements. |
| "... long-term affordable lifestyle for residents" | Although the classes were targeted at average citizens, the public sector has responded enthusiastically. After Dade County Housing and Urban Development Director Greg Byrne heard about the courses, he asked us to design and deliver an on-site workshop series. We trained senior management (responsible for more than twelve thousand units of public housing) to see their developments as neighborhoods and to envision them as focal points for change in the surrounding community. The workshops stimulated them to initiate immediate changes in operating policies and renovation plans. Miami's District 11 of the Florida Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services asked for a similar training session to help their service and facilities planners understand the geographic and cultural components of neighborhood identification. The workshops also covered why and how to work with community groups in targeting services, and how to use our investment in social service facilities to strengthen neighborhoods. |
| In the spring of 1996, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation funded a pilot program to expand the workshop series to three communities throughout South Florida's Everglades region as part of its Sustainable Everglades Initiative. To demonstrate the linkages between creative community development and critical environmental issues, we chose to work with a culturally and racially mixed group of downtown Miami residential neighborhoods that are both divided and linked by the Miami River, minority community organizations in South Dade County, and the small Everglades community of Belle Glade, on Lake Okechobee. |
| A great street is more than the means to move cars efficiently | It would be hard to imagine a community farther removed from the ordered sophistication of Seaside. So what does training in New Urbanist theory and ideals have to offer a small agricultural town like Belle Glade? The economy is still reeling from mechanization of the sugar industry and is preparing for further blows to the region's way of life as environmental groups target Big Sugar's pollution to protect and heal the Everglades and Florida Bay. Many residents drive to West Palm Beach to shop, further damaging the sustainability of the local economy. Some sections of town like the Loading Ramp, an open block where laborers are picked up by buses to work in the fields, approach third world conditions. Farm workers' organizations are preparing to sue the state health department to enforce local building codes because of unsanitary conditions in rental housing. Within this backdrop, the Citizen Planner workshops helped residents to prepare for a design charrette led by Daniel Williams, AIA, of the University of Miami's Center for Urban and Community Design. Using local and regional examples, we taught participants to conduct informal research, such as oral history and neighborhood identification, why the community was being threatened by sprawl-based development patterns, how the application of traditional design principles could help make the community function better, and how to identify available resources for improvements. About 120 residents and interested professionals participated in the two-day charrette. Because of their preparation, people who attended the Citizen-Planner sessions played key roles in the group's brainstorming and decision-making process. |
| Teams working on neighborhood, commercial center, and regional issues achieved quick consensus on redevelopment efforts. They decided to focus on revitalizing Belle Glade's historic center around the old city hall, narrowing the streets and adding trees, and instituting a commercial facade improvement program. They wanted to see the Hillsboro Canal, a bleak drainage structure that bisects the center of town, turned into a community focal point, with new waterfront shops, bed and breakfast inns, and open-air markets developed at its junction with Main Street. An emphasis on strengthening existing small businesses and local job creation was a cornerstone of the design solutions. They proposed turning the old city hall into a business incubator, and the old elementary school into a community center for use by non-profit groups. | |
Older public housing near Liberty City. |
Typically, when visionary plans are created, citizens are
left wondering how, if ever, they are to be carried out and whose
responsibility it is. We decided that a post-charrette workshop was needed
to help community activists focus on specific readily achievable projects.
Although the city had identified some funding available for
improvements--$96,000 for street trees, matching dollars for facade
improvements, and some $500,000 in CDBG funding for infrastructure
improvements--some citizens were concerned that the visions agreed to in
the charrette might not automatically be carried out. In addition to
outlining plans for maintaining a say in such larger-scale decisions, we
coached residents to look at what resources were immediately available, in
order to take a leadership role, to keep up momentum, and to educate other
citizens about the charrette's suggestions.
Because many of the participants' proposals centered around the historic downtown and the nearby Loading Ramp, we suggested they do something that very week to increase activities in those two locations. They agreed to initiate an ad hoc farmer's market in a downtown canal-side parking lot, visible from Main Street traffic, simply by encouraging produce vendors to move to that location on Saturday morning. They also committed to asking several friends to do their produce shopping there, ensuring a customer base and starting a "buzz" on the street. One participant agreed to locate some free entertainment like a high school singing or drama group (whose parents might shop for food as well). In a slightly longer term activity, we also suggested using part of the landscape funding to install trees in large moveable planters along the three-block business district and the nearby canal. Coupled with simply restriping the spaces to make diagonal parking (inexpensively narrowing the street and increasing parking by 60%) this quick action could help show skeptics how designed improvements might look and function. |
| In a similar fashion, we discovered that after the charrette focused renewed attention on the Loading Ramp, churches spontaneously started holding outdoor services there. It didn't take the citizen planners long to figure out that a coalition of churches could schedule frequent activities, such as choir practice, concerts, Bible classes, and bake sales, to generate significant interest in the area. As the meeting wound down, we were still brainstorming about chess tournaments, a farm truck as an impromptu stage for local bands, and an international market to take advantage of Belle Glade residents' thirty or more known countries of origin. | |
| there is no "they" to blame anymore | In the current national climate of scarce resources and increased competition for decreasing federal and state funding, communities that create, embrace, and act on a shared vision will be leading the pack. The hardest lesson to learn as we try to act locally is that there is no "they" to blame anymore. If we want to take control of our communities, we have to accept the responsibility for the work. If citizens have the will to change their government in the great Jeffersonian tradition, perhaps local governments will follow the lead and redirect available resources toward creating the vision piece by piece. |
| Harrison Bright Rue | |
| Harrison Bright Rue is a developer of affordable and special needs housing, an urban planner, community development consultant, and director of the Citizen Planner Program at Miami-Dade Community College. | |
| This article was originally published in Terra Nova: the Journal of Nature & Culture, Volume 1, Number 4, MIT Press 1996. | |
| Terra Nova Article(c) H.B. Rue February 27, 1997 4
Terra Nova Article(c) H.B. Rue February 27, 1997 13 |
| George D. Chapman, RLA Landmark@thegrid.net |
Received 20 December 1997 Article is Right On! As a land architect and environmental planner in the western U.S., I am quite envious of the described community involved. When Gertrude Stein's ". . .there's no there, there.", was really referring to "a sense of community." It is that sense that makes the issues so well explained in the article possible, or in our auto-dominated West, impossible. And the development community and the public officials (who are supposed to represent broader public interests) continue the unbalanced, and wasteful practices known as sprawl. The article is encouraging, but here in the West the growth (7%-14% a year) is consuming (destroying) communities by the minute. Little time to educate the "community" when everyone's stuck in traffic (or watching TV). |