Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [13]
The zoning plan of Coral Gables: a fine grain of mixed land uses and densities within an interconnected street network
Below, in fat marker pen, is a land-use plan—more accurately referred to as a bubble diagram—typical of those being produced for greenfield sites across the country. All the municipal government cares to know—and all the developer is held to—is that growth will take the form of single-use pods along a collector road. Is it any wonder that the result is sprawl? This plan guarantees it, since a mix of uses is not allowed in any one zone.
A modern zoning plan: a strict separation of land uses, a few big roads, and little else
This sort of plan manifests the public sector’s abrogation of responsibility for community-making to the private sector. Many would argue that its only purpose is to give the developer the utmost flexibility to build whatever physical environment he wants, at the public’s expense. It is an irony of modern zoning that this plan is, in effect, much more restrictive than Coral Gables’. While it is dangerously imprecise about urban form, it is utterly inflexible about land use. A developer who owns a twenty-acre pod of sprawl can provide only one thing. If there is no demand for that one thing, he is out of business.
The bubble diagram is not the only restriction that the developer has to deal with. It is supplemented by a pile of planning codes many inches thick. As exposed in Philip Howard’s The Death of Common Sense, these lengthy codes can be burdensome to the point of farce. But the problem with the current development codes is not just their size; they also seem to have a negative effect on the quality of the built environment. Their size and their result are symptoms of the same problem: they are hollow at their core. They do not emanate from any physical vision. They have no images, no diagrams, no recommended models, only numbers and words. Their authors, it seems, have no clear picture of what they want their communities to be. They are not imagining a place that they admire, or buildings that they hope to emulate. Rather, all they seem to imagine is what they don’t want: no mixed uses, no slow-moving cars, no parking shortages, no overcrowding. Such prohibitions do not a city make.
In the end, perhaps this is the most charitable way to consider sprawl. It wasn’t an accident, but neither was it based on a specific vision of its physical form or of the life that form would generate. As such, it remains an innocent error, but nonetheless an error that should not continue to be promoted. There is currently more sprawl covering American soil than was ever intended by its inventors. While there are some people who truly enjoy living in this environment, there are many others who would prefer to walk to school, bicycle to work, or simply spend less time in the car. It is for these people, who have access to ever fewer places that can accommodate their choice, that an alternative must be provided. And the only proven alternative to sprawl is the traditional neighborhood.
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THE DEVIL IS IN THE DETAILS
WHY TRAFFIC IS CONGESTED; WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY;
THE CONVENIENCE STORE VERSUS THE CORNER STORE;
THE SHOPPING CENTER AND THE OFFICE PARK VERSUS MAIN
STREET; USELESS AND USEFUL OPEN SPACE; WHY CURVING ROADS
AND CUL-DE-SACS DO NOT MAKE MEMORABLE PLACES
People say they do not want to live near where they work, but that they would like to work near where they live.
—ZEV COHEN, LECTURE (1995)
Let us take a closer look at sprawl to see how it compares to the traditional neighborhood at the level of the pavement. In doing so, it will be difficult not to conclude that many of the vexations of life in the new suburbs are the outcome of their physical design. This chapter and the next will inspect the components of