Reports: Urban design

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Not only have space expectations risen, the image of what is desirable has evolved. A half century of change now leaves a substantial portion of the postwar housing stock feeling cramped and looking spartan.

New Urban News Article with images, 10/1/2008
Cities in the western and eastern US are starting to let motorists and pedestrians deal with one another more intuitively.
Up and down the West Coast and in parts of the East Coast, a select group of streets is going through a radical makeover. The street surfaces are being raised to the same level as the sidewalks. Curbs are being eliminated. Trees and vegetation are extending into what had been the domain of the automobile.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Every human settlement, from wilderness to metropolis, contains structures standing out in their singularity in that place. Others in the same locale recede from individual prominence. The latter do so either by being diffident in their architectural expression or by being essentially like others in the vicinity. Sorting experience into such patterns of visual prominence — landmark or background structures, expressive or muted architecture — is something people do instinctively in order to be able to know where they are and move around in a place.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Considering what the pedestrian and driver see ahead is one of the basic tasks of good urban design; management of vistas is not an empty formal gesture. It helps people get around more easily and interestingly, and it displays that which the civitas considers to be significant. Physical structure and social structure in urbanism are often mutually revealing.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Function is the broad range and mix of activities which may be well-harbored in a building manifesting a given type; it is not the narrow, unreachable-in-practice, mono-use tailoring of Modernist theorization. The type’s configuration is the normative three-dimensional arrangement of spaces which customarily assemble to constitute the type; it denotes both the internal spaces and their relationships. The third aspect, a type’s disposition, is less studied and understood. It is the way the type’s standard configuration is placed on its site with respect to the site’s legal and social bounds. But “is placed” is too passive; disposition is an active aspect, and of paradoxical nature.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell
The benefits promised by New Urbanism spring directly from its emphasis on walking as the main way of moving through the world. Where places are made genuinely walkable, private vehicle mileage likely will be reduced and public transit will certainly be more viable. The convenience and interest of living at higher densities will more than make up for any annoyances. Children, the elderly, and those with physical impairments will gain greater quality and quantity of access, and that sometimes-elusive community glue called social capital is likelier to be produced in places with pedestrians inhabiting a public realm.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell
Real estate development’s most tediously repeated truism is that the three most important factors in property value are location, location, and location. That observation has now been stretched into a self-fulfilling prophecy. American retailing, in particular, has been subject to the mindless protocol of “locations” made by the intersection of traffic counts, producing at those points the massively repetitious shopping centers and malls of American suburbia.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The varieties of semi-public  spaces must be differentiated from the family of wholly public spaces that includes the square (in its various sub-species), the plaza, and the green. Two of these semi-public  spaces, the quadrangle (formed by individual  buildings)  and the courtyard (formed by a continuous perimeter range) occur at all scales, but most commonly at the scale of the entire block.  A third type, the forecourt, also occurs at different scales, but usually associated only with a single building.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

In the practice of urbanism, a host of techniques can help people move around easily and interestingly. One group of techniques consists of methods that visually encourage a pedestrian or a driver to move in a particular direction.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Of all the types of building frontages, the pattern known as dooryard and light court is the one demonstrating the greatest number of sophisticated variations. It was the model used in many neighborhoods, both elegant and modest, built during the flowering of American cities between the Civil War and WW I. It is an adaptable pattern, and so the neighborhoods and buildings using it have proven more resistant to decline than others, and have often led the way in urban revivals.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

The last two decades have witnessed a heartening revival of traditional planning techniques. Element after element, the components of walkable, mixed-use, civically conscious environments have been restudied, redeployed into use, and gradually have gained widespread acceptance on the part of the public and even of non-new urbanist professionals.

New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Every component of urbanism possesses both technical and social dimensions. While there are always good reasons for a traditional component or relationship of components to assume a standard form, there are also times when some widespread alteration of social circumstance licenses, indeed demands, technical reinvention.