Green Community

Edited by Susan Piedmont-Palladino and Timothy Mennel
APA Planners Press, 192 pp., $63.95 hardcover

This book, released in conjunction with a “green community” show at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, initially caused me to wonder: How much should we expect from a book that probably was intended primarily for museum-goers? My gut feeling is: We should expect a great deal. There’s no point in producing a book for people of above-average intelligence that glosses over issues.

I was disappointed that Green Community got off to a less than stellar start with an introductory essay by British planning historian Peter Hall titled “The Sustainable City: A Mythical Beast?” Hall, author of the brilliant Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, which I’ve loved since buying a copy in 1990, here tries to assure readers that yes, we can create sustainable cities — “we have done it before, and we have done it over a very long period ….”

Hall corrals together the garden city of Ebenezer Howard, the Radburn experiment of the 1920s, the greenbelt towns of Franklin Roosevelt, the “new towns” of postwar Britain, and a bunch of other well-intentioned places, all with the aim of arguing, “We need to go back and learn from what was best about those towns.” The problem with his premise is that those communities differ enormously in their basic concepts. And many were not “sustainable” in any strict sense of the word.

Hall does point out recent innovations worth learning about. In Grenoble, France, “people are encouraged to use park-and-ride garages, where the ticket for parking is also a ticket for the streetcar, which can be boarded next door in the same structure.” In Adelaide, Australia, buses run at 60 mph along guideways, “but when they reach transfer stations, they exit onto ordinary streets and zigzag through neighborhoods, with no stop farther than 550 yards from any given residential front door.”

He raises useful questions on “what densities should we be striving for if we are to make these districts fully accessible to public transportation.” He suggests that although New Urbanism has promoted higher-density neighborhoods, the result “seems not dense enough.” He may be right about many neighborhoods, but my confidence was undermined by his choice of outdated examples, such as Laguna West in Sacramento, California. From such a distinguished scholar, the essay is a bit of a letdown.

The next piece, by F. Kaid Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council, nicely summarizes recent findings on how mixed uses, walkable settings, regionally accessible locations, and increases in the number of households or jobs per acre can substantially cut car trips and reduce damage to the environment. Fred Hansen, general manager of Tri-Met, then explains how Portland, Oregon, brought daily vehicle miles per capita down by more than 7 percent between 1996 and 2006 while the national trend was going in the opposite direction — up 8 percent.

In an essay on how mixed use, mixed-income development can deal with the huge challenge of accommodating 100 million more Americans in the next 50 years, developer Jonathan Rose makes a case for governmental reform. “HUD and state programs that set low cost-per-unit limits favor suburban sprawl,” he warns. “Every HUD and FHA program needs to be reviewed and either made location neutral or refocused to support TOD and urban infill.”

Virginia Tech’s Robert E. Lang, always an interesting thinker, and Mariela Alfonzo, an urban design researcher, predict that the coming generation of growth “will mostly be deflected back to built-up places in the form of infill development,” with the consequence that “many of the country’s biggest regions now face build out on an unprecedented scale.”

Retail cycles pose problems for mixed use
Lang and Alfonzo make fascinating observations about the challenges of creating denser compact growth. Across the country, new urbanists, particularly those who work with failed shopping malls and former industrial land, are trying to generate places that mix work, shopping, and housing — often with dwellings on top of retail. Lang and Alfonzo caution: “We do not yet know how these new mixed use centers will evolve. … retail centers are notorious for requiring constant renovation and upkeep. Retail trends cycle approximately every five years, and the half-life of a retail center is said to be approximately 15 years.”

“If a mixed use center were to fail, for residents it would be more problematic than if they just lived near failed shopping centers,” they point out. And since retail owners, such as real estate investment trusts, have fairly short property-holding strategies — they “can range from five to 10 years” — the owners of residential units probably need public officials and planners to start looking ahead now and establishing policies that confront the potential downside of mixed use.  

Other essayists focus on energy, historic preservation, watersheds, public health, food, community gardening, and other concerns, so the book ends up covering an extensive range of “green community” topics. Despite its shaky start, there’s a lot of engaging or instructive material here. It will enlighten bright citizens, and deliver enough fresh ideas and information to please experienced new urbanists as well.