The Atlantic Monthly: “A Good Place to Live”

While the Sustainable Northampton Plan is under consideration, let’s consider some successful initiatives seen elsewhere. In this Atlantic Monthly article (March 1988), Philip Langdon discusses architects who spurn sprawl and admire characteristics of nineteenth-century American towns, all while acknowledging the preferences of today’s homebuyers and the realities of cars:

At first glance, what seems to make Seaside [Florida] special is the old-fashioned down-home style of its houses… eighty-acre community where 100 houses have been built and about 300 houses and 200 apartments eventually will be…

For at least two decades there has been a growing interest in “vernacular architecture”–commonplace buildings of the past, embodying folk wisdom about design and construction…

Every house built in Seaside is different, but within the variety is a fundamental orderliness, established by the unifying wooden walls and metal roofs, the substantial porches, the proportions of the windows, and a number of other elements, among them the harmonious colors…

The sense that the street forms an agreeable outdoor room is an integral part of the appeal of great cities like Paris and London and of many sought-after urban neighborhoods…

…at Seaside people routinely walk to one another’s houses and walk from there to restaurants and other attractions.

…the value of property in the development has surged at the same time that condominiums on the coast nearby have had a hard time attracting buyers… “The newest idea in planning is the nineteenth-century town,” [Andres] Duany told a conference of Florida apartment developers last year. “That’s what is really selling.”

…The architects were stimulated by Robert Stern’s historical studies of British and American suburbs and by the European urban theorist Leon Krier, who advocates a return to small cities on a human scale… “American street space is a lot bigger than European street space, and it depends on trees, planted in steady rows, to obtain its spatial definition.” [Duany]

…Duany and Plater-Zyberk seek, and often get, the job of writing the codes; they are well aware that the person who draws up the codes usually wields more power than the architect who actually designs the buildings.

Young designers and independent-minded developers are drawn to this neo-traditional revolution out of disenchantment with the mess that Americans have made of their communities… Cape Cod, for example, has seen its resident population double in two decades, and the growth has been badly managed…

“We try to link with or reinforce the existing place, to complement what’s already there,” Brian Shea, who designed the [Cityfront Center project, in Chicago] along with Cooper, says.

…Architects design a building when they ought to be designing the open space that will give the development its overall character.

…what is required is a skillful balancing act. The things that provoked the decline of traditional methods of community design–among them cars and a desire to escape the disturbances and sometimes cramped living of compact, multi-purpose neighborhoods–are with us as much as ever. The designers and developers who work in a traditional vein must take these into account while at the same time delivering the satisfactions that were abundant in cities and towns several decades ago.

See also:

The New Draft Sustainable Northampton Plan: Balancing Compact Growth Against Taxes, Urban Greenspace, Homeowner Preferences; Come to the November 8 Hearing
The plan has the potential to transform the look and feel of the most built-up 15% of Northampton, roughly the same area affected by the newly implemented 10-foot wetlands buffer zones. It prioritizes compact growth. Homebuilders are to be encouraged to build within walking distance of existing urban centers, where substantial infrastructure already exists. This sounds reasonable, but it must be carefully managed to avoid harming the interests of existing residents…

The best plans will fail if they don’t appeal to the people. A 1993 Fannie Mae poll showed that “86 percent of American households believed that owning a home was better than renting…and 73 percent preferred a single-family detached home with a yard”…

Pictures of Northampton Streets at Various Densities
The Sustainable Northampton Plan calls for high and medium density housing in downtown and the “more densely developed areas”, 12-65 units per acre. (p.13)

Letter to Gazette: “Increased housing density will hurt Northampton”
…The Northampton we all wish to sustain is the Northampton that we have now…

Increasing the population density of our residential neighborhoods is the very opposite of what is needed to sustain the quality of life here in our beautiful city. It is the very thing that destroyed Springfield, a city that had been a lovely residential city, the remnants of which are still visible behind the rubble.

Tailoring Infill and the New Urbanism to Northampton
…we should learn from the human-scaled success of places like Nantucket, St. Augustine, Georgetown, Beacon Hill, Nob Hill, Alexandria, Charleston, Savannah, Annapolis, Princeton, Greenwich Village and Marblehead.

The Atlantic Monthly: “How Portland Does It”
Up from grates in the sidewalks grow hundreds of trees, mature enough that when the sun is low on the horizon, their leaves cast shade on the second and third stories of buildings. The trees soften the downtown…

The downtown is amply supplied with parks…

Berkeley, California: Cautions on Infill
As noted recently in the Planet, the Berkeley Planning Department has received an infill development award from the American Planning Association (APA). How can this be? you ask. After all, Berkeley has recently been engulfed in a storm of land use controversy, a stack of lawsuits and appeals, and new Big Ugly Buildings strikingly similar to those that initiated the Neighborhood Preservation Ordinance in 1973…

Citizen input into long-range planning is excellent—which is why citizens are so astonished when their plans are entirely ignored by the current Planning Division… staff makes no genuine attempt to facilitate cooperation between applicants and neighbors. Instead, propelled by their simplistic “smart growth” philosophy, staff encourages developers to build the largest possible projects over neighborhood objections…

In 1990, 60 percent of New Yorkers said they would live somewhere else if they could, and in 2000, 70 percent of urbanites in Britain felt the same way. Many suburbanites commute hours every day just to have “a home, a bit of private space, and fresh air.” But unfortunately, running off to suburbia or to the wilderness to find contentment is becoming environmentally and economically unviable.

We must draw people back into relatively compact urban areas. Showcase cities that have managed to attract would-be suburbanites into increased core densities have done so through neighborhood revitalization and by giving priority to quality of life, not density. This is the opposite of what Berkeley is doing…

Renters and other high-density residents are expected to do without adequate living space, greenspace, quiet, and cars; and without cars, they lack the freedom, pleasure, and mobility taken for granted by average Americans. This is ethically unacce
ptable…

We cannot let planners and developers decide what we will do with our lives. I never hear planners discussing psychological health and cultural values. Planners have a different approach. As one Berkeley planner told me, no matter what they build, eventually those who can or must tolerate the new, worse environment will replace those who can’t. As this happens, resistance to further degradation lessens. But I reject this “race to the bottom.” And with enough time, planners and developers could also train Americans to live like drones in anthills—but why let them?

New York Times City Room Blog: “Time for Some Jane Jacobs Revisionism?” (11/1/07)
Jacobs was not opposed to change and growth, but believed change was most destructive when it occurred in cataclysmic bursts.