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By Root 556 0

historically has determined the location and rate of new growth, rather than leaving it up to the private sector. When expansion was desired, the city would condemn farmland at farmland prices, design the new neighborhood, lay the infrastructure, subdivide the land, and sell it off at market rate. The value generated in preparing the land for building would accrue to the city. This technique not only ensures wise development but also explains why the city of Berlin can afford an arts budget larger than America’s entire National Endowment for the Arts. In the current American system, which supposedly reflects a repulsion for big government’s interference in free enterprise, it must be stressed that city government is still a partner in the land development process—albeit a silent one. It typically finances the roads, the infrastructure, the schools, the libraries, the police and fire stations, just as in Europe. The only real difference is that, in America, city governments exercise little control over the enormous taxpayer investment in these facilities.

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In the meantime, many of the evils of commuting can be mitigated by concentrating the workplace at transportation nodes—town centers—in order that the jobs be transitaccessible, no matter where the workers live.

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Susan Chira, “Is Smaller Better?,” A1. The most comprehensive of these conversions are taking place in Philadelphia and New York City.

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In fact, a well-placed town center can even mitigate the traffic problems of surrounding suburban subdivisions by providing walkable destinations such as workplace, convenience retail, and a transit stop, and also by intercepting automobile trips that would otherwise be longer.

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This argument becomes a bit easier when one mentions—as the engineering manuals demonstrate statistically—that roads carry more traffic at 30 mph than they do at higher speeds. As cars breach 30 mph, they begin to spread apart, and this increased vehicle spacing results in a drop in roadway capacity.

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In the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues applied a regular mile-square grid over the Appalachian wilderness, across the Ohio Valley, and into the Great Plains. Seventy-five years later, the Homestead Act further divided each square mile into “quarter sections,” still plainly visible as one flies across the country. As a result, the quarter section is by far the most common size for housing subdivisions. Conveniently, it corresponds to the ideal neighborhood size, which is a five-minute walk from edge to center.

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Developing new neighborhoods with this approach to the natural environment is logical enough. Restoring environmental integrity in already urbanized areas is a more complex undertaking. The work of Bill Morrish and Catherine Brown has begun to show the way for a long-term approach to reconceiving the built environment. For continued reading, we recommend their book Planning to Stay: Learning to See the Physical Features of Your Neighborhood.

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Plazas are primarily paved, and tend to occur in places with a Mediterranean tradition, such as New Mexico. Squares are mostly green, but are formally arranged, and are common throughout the United States, particularly in the old South and the Midwest. Greens, a New England specialty, are grassy and informal, as if a piece of pasture has been captured by the city The dominance of different urban spaces in different locations reminds us that planning has certain cultural determinants that often overrule the social, economic, and environmental determinants.

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The conventional wisdom among transit analysts is that a minimum of seven dwellings per acre is needed to support bus service every thirty minutes, and fifteen units per acre can support bus service every ten minutes (Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problem, Florida’s Mobility Primer, 38).

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The famous “Green Book,” the manual of the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, recommends yield streets as follows: “The level of inconvenience occasioned by the lack of