Several generations of Americans have watched in silent sadness as our landscape has been ravaged beyond recognition: green countryside bulldozed into unsightly strip malls, spirited small towns transformed into drab suburban agglomerations, bustling city neighborhoods drained of life and left for dead. And it seemed there was nothing we could do about it. Soulless sprawl was an unalterable fact of life, like tornadoes in Kansas and humidity in Houston. Real towns, offering vibrant street life and inviting public places, became something many of us experienced only on vacation: in the French Quarter, Provincetown, or Europe.
Then along came Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, partners in both architecture and marriage, who created Seaside, a celebrated resort development on Florida’s Gulf Coast that captures what is best about classic old southern towns like Savannah, Charleston, and Key West: narrow streets, second-story porches, and a lively town center within easy walking distance. A strong feeling of connectedness has arisen among residents (and even visitors) thanks to all the impromptu socializing that happens when people meet on the sidewalk, see each other on their front porches, or gather in the public squares. It feels like home — or at least how home used to feel before the advent of freeways, Wal-Mart, and three-car garages.
Seaside was an immediate hit; property values increased tenfold in just a few years after ground was broken in 1980. Duany, Plater-Zyberk, and their firm (now with offices in Miami, Charlotte, Washington, D.C., and Manila, Philippines) have since launched 140 projects, from a pedestrian oriented mobile home park in Arizona to Prince Charles’ celebrated Poundbury village in England, all of them designed to offer the charm, conviviality, and convenience of traditional towns.
Time magazine hailed Seaside as one of the ten great design achievements of the 1980s. Vincent Scully, a Yale professor and one of America’s leading architecture critics, calls Duany and Plater-Zyberk’s work "the most important contemporary movement in architecture." At the same time, they’ve earned the scorn of many fellow architects, who say they want to turn back progress or — worse — that they indulge in sappy nostalgic Disneyfication. "They were brave enough to acknowledge that we used to do architecture right in America," counters Scully, "and now we were doing it wrong."
Despite the controversy their work inspires, what they do is far from radical. They simply make the case, both in blueprints and in speeches around the country, that "there are two models for growth in America. One is the traditional neighborhood pattern and one is suburban sprawl. The old neighborhoods still work, and we would like to make them an option for people again." (See "The Traditional Neighborhood and Suburban Sprawl," pp 33-34.)
In some cases, this means revitalizing an existing urban district, such as they did in the downtowns of West Palm Beach and Naples, Florida. Sometimes it means creating a new town from scratch, like Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod, a pedestrian-oriented downtown created from the parking lot of an old mall, or Middleton Hills, a community with Prairie style architecture that rose from farm fields outside Madison, Wisconsin. Often, they rework zoning codes for cities and counties, making it possible once again to build the kinds of classical communities that Americans still love.
"It is actually illegal in most places — literally against the law — to build these kind of communities, the places that human beings have favored for centuries," Duany says, revealing the showmanship and indisputable common sense that make him a compelling public speaker. He’s made this case at hundreds of public meetings around the country, often riling up the crowd to demand changes in their own hometowns. Bureaucrats steadfastly opposed to any zoning variances or new codes often change their tune when confronted by citizens with a passionate new vision of what their communities can be.
Suburban sprawl is not the product of natural urban evolution, Duany and Plater-Zyberk explain. It’s the direct result of current zoning codes that dictate wide streets, huge lots, attached two-car garages, and the absolute separation of houses from shops and workplaces. The result is that the typical suburban family now makes a dozen automobile trips every day because their home is cut off from stores and schools by impassable rivers of roaring traffic.
More than aesthetics suffer from this kind of development. Children can’t wander down to the park or skip over to the candy store. Sometimes they can’t even go play with kids across the street. To go anywhere, they have to wait for someone to drive them. Old people and the disabled, many of whom can’t drive or have trouble crossing busy wide streets, are similarly restricted. They’re placed under a sort of house arrest.
Low-and-middle income people also suffer. According to American Automobile Association, it costs $5,762 a year to buy and maintain a modest car. When a car (or probably two) becomes a necessity simply to go to work and do your shopping, a family must then scrimp on other expenses, like meals and housing, to make ends meet. Even comfortably upper-middle class people pay a steep price. Duany estimates that spending two hours every weekday in your car commuting to work, taxiing the kids around town, and running errands (not unusual in suburban areas), adds up to eight weeks a year away from the people and pastimes you love.
James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape, insists there is an even deeper way we pay for the folly of poor planning. "It matters that our cities are primarily auto storage depots," he says. "It matters that our junior high schools look like insecticide factories. It matters that our libraries look like beverage distribution warehouses. It matters that the best hotel in town looks like a minimum security prison." To live and work and walk among such surroundings is a form of spiritual degradation, he says. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when everything you see on a typical day, from the vast black flatness of parking lots to strings of dull new buildings with flat roofs and blank sides, is so unrelentingly ugly.
"Communities are designed today to make cars happy, not people," Duany notes. "Elizabeth and I are not asking for people to sacrifice. We’re offering people the pleasure of walking to work and shopping. We’re not taking their cars away. They just don’t have to use them all the time. It’s about having choices."
"Everything you build should be either a neighborhood or a village," he adds, pointing out that great cities are nothing more than a series of villages artfully stitched together. He outlines the basic principles that guided town planners until World War II. Both villages and neighborhoods, he says, should provide the basic necessities of life — a grocery store plus maybe a cleaners, a pharmacy, a cafe, parks, day care, schools, and perhaps a bookshop or ice cream parlor. There should also be the chance for some residents to work right in the neighborhood and a mix of housing types that can accommodate people of all ages and incomes. And it should be no more than a five-minute walk from the edge of the neighborhood to the center.
This simple wisdom was lost in the post-war boom years. What went wrong, Duany says, is that the massive wartime production strategies developed in defense factories was applied to the building of homes. Instead of paying careful attention to all the details that made a neighborhood a pleasant place to live, planners narrowly focused on churning out large numbers of houses on an assembly line scale. They succeeded in creating modern housing for millions of middle-class Americans but sacrificed quality in favor of quantity. Little thought was given to how children might get around or what would happen to suburbanites when they were old and not able to drive. At the same time, the government offered returning GIs incredibly generous loans to buy new houses, but no money to purchase or fix-up existing houses. "This is how we murdered our cities," Duany states.
The traditional town that Duany and Plater-Zyberk advocate brings back into one place the basics of people’s lives. "It’s a fundamental civic right," says Duany, "to have daily needs available within walking distance." Not only is there less need to jump in your car every time you want a carton of eggs, there’s a greater sense of community. You talk with neighbors on the street or at the coffee shop rather than waving to them from behind a windshield.
Besides these personal advantages, traditional towns help solve the problems of traffic congestion, sprawl, air pollution, affordable housing, and urban decline. Driving is reduced and public transportation boosted, since a central shopping district makes bus and train connections more convenient. Apartments for young people, retired couples, and other lower-income households can be blended in with single-family homes — above the stores, in granny flats behind houses, in multifamily units near the bus stop or train stop.
As the popularity of traditional town planning grows, it boosts the prospects of inner-city neighborhoods, where in many cases these qualities already exist. "We have an underlying goal to change the way we build and destroy cities," Plater-Zyberk says. "We want to make and rebuild places that are so good people won’t want to tear them down in twenty years. And there is a social aspect to it, which is about creating a physical environment that fosters social connectedness."
Duany and Plater-Zyberk have not been alone in promoting a new vision for American communities; a number of architects — Peter Calthorpe and Daniel Solomon in San Francisco, among others — arrived at the same conclusions around the same time, and these ideas have blossomed into a growing movement called New Urbanism. New Urbanist projects are now under way in thirty-four states, ranging from Disney’s famous town of Celebration near Orlando, which will eventually encompass eight thousand homes and a downtown, to a block of attractive retail shops with affordable apartments upstairs in the hard-hit neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles.
"One thing that excites me," says Plater-Zyberk, whose style is cerebral compared to her husband’s passionate tone, "is how prominent the physical environment — both natural and built — is in the concerns of the average citizen. From the kids on campuses protesting to save historic buildings to the everyday residents participating in public meetings, there is a great deal more engagement with these issues than there was just a few years ago."
This article was adapted from the book Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life, by Jay Walljasper, Jon Spayde, and editors of Utne Reader, to be published this fall by New Society Publishers (800-567-6772; www.Newsociety.org).