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CNU XV: New Urbanism and the Old City
May 17-20, 2007 in Philadelphia, PA
The 15th annual Congress for the New Urbanism conference was held this year in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As advocates of New Urbanist principles, representatives from Vision Long Island and ADL III joined other local planners and architects at this conference.
Vision Long Island has attended the CNU since 1997.
Check out CNU's official website. The main theme of this year’s conference was “New Urbanism and the Old City,” focusing on applying New Urbanist techniques and principles more focally on infill and already aging cities, instead of creating entirely new places.
Below are some of the conference’s highlights:
New Jersey Development Forum
In a session focused on New Urbanism in New Jersey, developers and elected officials spoke on the huge advances made by the state. In a land of home rule, the speakers showed examples of New Urbanist development, such as a TOD with a privately funded NJ Transit station.
Jim Maley, Mayor of Collingswood, NJ has been able to revitalize existing structures in the downtown area, such as fixing up and redeveloping a run-down and abandoned middle school, while also using various brownfield infill techniques, such as turning a lumberyard into a high-density, modern condo complex, to make the entire town more beautiful and successful. Many of the speakers pointed out that people have, since September 11th, 2001, had a strong desire to “go back” to the kinds of places that they grew up in; something of a more traditional community development.
In response to people who say that New Urbanist development costs more than McMansion gated communities, Mayor Maley explained that it would cost more to the community to do nothing at all and that the biggest challenge he faced was convincing people that it was going to get better.
Pennsylvania Development Forum
In a session focused on New Urbanism and development in Pennsylvania, Bruce Katz made a presentation that advocated empowering local governments, making reinvestments a priority, building up a competitive economy, reactivating the state planning board, increasing the capacity of county and local governments, fostering more multi-municipality collaborate projects, allowing boundary changes, increasing the palette of available tax tools for counties and municipalities, addressing underlining problems facing local governments, and recapturing the role and power of the states.
He noted that consumer preferences are changing and that most local municipalities spend their time fighting over resources instead of focusing on improvements to their communities. In a state where the rural land that so long defined it, Katz said that Pennsylvania needs a unified, cohesive vision for larger urban center development.
Jersey City and Hoboken Forum
This session focused on the development and redevelopment of Jersey City and Hoboken, New Jersey. One of the biggest challenges facing Hoboken is parking, something that stems from the fact that the city was planned and developed before the time of automobiles. In response to the severe parking shortage that exists there, all new development in the area is required to provide additional parking needs. However, the unique character of Hoboken poses interesting challenges to developers, who must integrate larger parking structures into the brick townhouse facades that define the area.
The recent explosion of development of high-rise buildings in Jersey City is in response to the cheap and available land just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. It is also an answer to the worldwide trend of ‘going big,’ seen in places like Dubai and Shanghai. There are plans in place to make a new, green city center.
New Urbanism & the Old City
Smart Growth pioneer Andres Duany led a presentation about the current state of New Urbanism and our country’s aging city centers. He boldly explained that we must study failure to see what works, both in suburban and urban settings. His main points were that the city must be solvent, from a tax-base perspective; it needs to be in a prosperous region; there needs to be responsible leadership; and leaders must address ethnic animosity on a cultural level.
According to Mr. Duany, cities were murdered by government policy mistakes and the highways that were supposed to skirt the cities went right through and created more traffic problems than they solved. Suburban codes, especially those regarding setbacks and parking, have now been applied to city planning. He also said that the greening of everything in the city is undermining the city. In the suburbs, privatized security and maintenance have made for a standard of spotlessly clean and crime-free neighborhoods, something that cities cannot compete with
Regionalism: The Third Layer of New Urbanism
Friday night’s plenary session featured an inspiring speech by former Mayor of Philadelphia and current Governor of Pennsylvania, Hon. Edward G. Rendell. He spoke of revitalizing Philadelphia and working with New Urbanist principles and community participation to make his town a great place to live and work.
Other speakers for the evening included Hank Dittmar, CNU Board Chair and Peter Calthorpe, winner of the Nichols Prize from the Urban Land Institute in 2006. The overall findings of the session were that cities were going to be blending together due to expansion and sprawl by the year 2050 if things continued a their current rate. Cities must work together in order to plan now to save open space and resources.
Is Small the New Big? New Trends in a Slowing Building Industry
In an economy where home building has slowed dramatically over the last few years, builders are turning to different techniques to satisfy the market without having excess property and no one to purchase it.
A parallel was drawn between an iPod Nano and a Katrina Cottage. Both of these function well, are efficient in use of materials and space, are affordable, and have a design that is something people will recognize, be comfortable with, and want. Katrina Cottages are changing the perception that affordable housing is what’s left over after market-value houses are built.
Perception and reality of small spaces depends on the quality of design. In some structures, including Katrina Cottages, the square footage might be smaller, but everything else, from windows to spacing, is the same as in a larger home. McMansions, on the other hand, miss the point of scale.
The two largest generations, the 82 million baby boomers (46-64 years) and the 78 million millennials (77-96 years) will converge between 2004-2024. The millennials will move out to apartments and baby boomers scaling down in size to mostly 1-2 person households. Currently statistics show the following numbers:
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58.8% of households are 1 or 2 persons
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9% of homes are purchased by single men
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Single women purchase 21% of homes.
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Bungalows, lofts, townhouses, and townhouses over flats are also popular with single women.
Marianne Cusato of Cusato Cottages LLC then pointed out that as technology gets smaller the houses get bigger. For example, in 1950 homes were 983 square feet. In 1970 this number rose to 1,500 square feet and by 2004 houses were generally 2, 349 square feet. Function, cost, and design are elements of good product design in the cottage company. The square footage may be small but the elements are of a normal size.
Louis Marquet, Executive Vice President of Leyland Alliance LLC, added that design and detail raise the value of a home. Designing simple houses with rich detail, like porches, enhance the aesthetic richness of the street.
New Urbanist Work in New Orleans
In a session run by Andres Duany, Ray Gindroz, Steven Oubre, and Michael Mehaffy, the group discussed the rapidly changing landscape of rebuilding New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta. New Orleans and Mississippi have gone from being the least planned and regulated areas in the country to the most advanced planned in the world.
Social standing in the New Orleans area is neighborhood based, as Mr. Duany noted, which was the main reason behind the uprising that New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin faced when he attempted to move people following Hurricane Katrina.
The group spoke of retrofitting town centers and holding charrettes for the residents in order to create a true plan for the future of the area that they could be proud of.
New Urbanism For All
The CNU has had a great deal of involvement in HOPE VI redevelopment. People want defensible space and an address. Robert Fishman stated in this presentation that crisis in affordable housing is not a housing problem, but an income problem.
Some of the presenters posed the question of housing vouchers as a way to increase people’s income, saying that 150,000 new housing vouchers would be used over the next 10 years, with about 10,000 of those being “opportunity vouchers.”
It is less about the design and more about the politics. Some developers resent having to use create 20% affordable housing. In order to minimize this, the speakers suggested that they create mixed income communities with mobility of housing stock, where the affordability of housing stock changes over time.
Mr. DOT Secretary, Tear Down This Wall
Ingrid Reed kicked off this presentation, stressing the importance of the Boulevard. She said that tearing down a freeway and replacing it with a boulevard opened up 29 acres of developable space in Trenton, NJ.
Cary Moon, of the People’s Waterfront Coalition in Seattle, spoke of the economic benefits of getting rid of a waterfront highway and replacing it with a park and recreating the street grid pattern. Norm Marshall, a mathematician, modeler, and transportation specialist, added that the street grid pattern in Vancouver can allow for cars to travel at twice the capacity than an urban freeway.
LEED Neighborhood Development
In this presentation, mainly for developers, the speakers explained the new LEED Rating System, which features smart location and linkage; neighborhood pattern and design; and green construction and technology. They also spoke of a three-stage certification process – pre-review of the proposed plan; certification of the plan; and certification of a completed neighborhood development. Even if the deadline is missed, they noted that a plan can still be certified after completion, if all of the standards are met.
New Urbanism & Comprehensive Plans
In a session focused on getting New Urbanism across as a different way of coding urbanism, speakers focused on understanding the scale of the region and the city, explaining that plans must go beyond land use. Implementation must be embedded in the plan to set the stage for coding, streetscape, and transportation.
The presentation included an analysis of the issues, opportunities, and existing conditions of neighborhoods, districts, corridors, and precincts such as airports. In addition, they compared preservation and enhancement with change and transformation (immediate) /evolution (long-term).
Another speaker proposed that there be different scales for New Urbanist development in keeping with neighborhoods, districts, and corridors, so that the existing structures become the regulatory geography for code-based form. Graphical comprehensive, for example, use neighborhoods as a basic idea.
Curb to Cupola
Steve Morizon began this session by speaking of a toggle switch from ordinary to authentic design styles and explained that there was a wide variety in a narrow range to express a creative identity. Other presentations throughout the session proposed that detailed street sections are the key to creating memorable styles that are in keeping with the existing beauty of an area. When creating such a detailed street section, Mila Watkins explained that it is important to focus on streetlight transects, street suffices, regulating plans, identifying terminated vistas, having no bulbouts, putting fire hydrants at corners so you don’t lose parking spaces, utility details, mailbox standards, and street trees.
Village Green/Green Village
In a session focused on open space planning, speakers explained that it is as important to consider what a space will look like in January as it is through spring, summer, and fall.
The Mythical Parking Shortage
Partly a commodity, partly infrastructure, the reality of parking in an average office park uses 2.56 spaces per 1000 square feet.
Patrick Seigman, Principal at Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates, suggests the following Seven Step Recovery Process based on the “Pasadena Traffic Reduction Strategy Study.”
- Charge the right price for curb parking (1-2 vacant spaces/block and 85% occupancy at any time). That means enough so that there is one or tow free spaces on every block at any time of the day.
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Return at least part of the money generated to the local community so that parking meters become a revenue stream for the community rather than just something that's anti-motorist.
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Banish minimum parking requirements, e.g., six spaces per 1,000 square feet of retail space.
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Unbundle the cost of parking from leasing community space. Drop requirements that commercial tenants be required to rent parking spaces as a function of their lease. If employers aren't required to rent parking, they have less incentive to offer free parking. It's an indirect connection, but ultimately some employees will figure out how to leave their cars at home
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Unbundle the cost of a parking space from the cost of buying a dwelling. If purchase of a parking space is optional, some homebuyers will opt not to buy.
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Require employers who offer free parking to provide a "cash out" for employees who don't use the free parking. This yields a 30% reduction in traffic.
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Continue to subsidize parking where it's necessary to attract retail tenants, but in atargeted way: 90-minute free parking for shoppers, not all-day free parking for employees
Raomy Valera, Vice President at Timothy Haahs and Associates, added that it is an “issue of political will.” For $28-30,000 per space it is a “100-year parking event.” In order to meet maximum parking requirements there must be a cap for the district. The transfer of parking rights, issues of security and marketability, and “monetizing” unused private parking spaces are several suggestions. For example, the city of Santa Monica has 1.9 spaces per 1,000 square feet. Vision Long Island also has shared parking standards. A question that should also be considered is not how far will people walk for parking but how far will they walk to save a dollar? Robotic parking can also be found in DC, NYC, and Hoboken, NJ. Any parking over the minimum required is to be more expensive.
Affordable Housing: The Vitality of Design
This session discussed creative design elements and financing vehicles that are currently utilized by leading designers and developers in the field. Several speakers, including Andres Duany spoke abut the challenges of balancing the increased demand of affordable housing with the need for aesthetically attractive designs that will benefit and uplift communities. Duany mentioned that there should not be 1 architect designing 16 styles, rather 16 architects designing 1 style. ICA and Habitat incorporate 1 million volunteers per year to build houses that are “volunteer friendly” in their simplicity.
Why Do Our Building Look Like Crap? Exploring the Role of Building Crafts in New Urbanism
Hank Dittmar, Chief Executive of the Prince’s Foundation of the Built Environment, moderated this session in which developers and designers explored the problem of low quality construction. According to Dittmar, “heritage building skills” are in decline resulting in shabby, short-lived towns. Steve Mouzon, Principal of the New Urban Guild, dated this trend to 1925 and the “great decline” in the traditional skills and craft in the construction industry. Mouzon added that the “specialists know more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.”
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