Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [15]
WHEN NEARBY IS STILL FAR AWAY
Another paradox of suburban planning is the distinction that it creates between adjacency and accessibility. While many of the destinations of daily life are often next to each other, only rarely are they easy to reach directly.
For example, even though the houses pictured here are adjacent to the shopping center, in experience they are considerably more distant. Local ordinances have forced the developers to build a wall between the two properties, discouraging even the most intrepid citizen from walking to the store. The resident of a house just fifty yards away must still get into the car, drive half a mile to exit the subdivision, drive another half mile on the collector road back to the shopping center, and then walk from car to store. What could have been a pleasant two-minute walk down a residential street becomes instead an expedition requiring the use of gasoline, roadway capacity, and space for parking.
Supporters of this separatist single-use zoning argue that people do not want to live near shopping. This is only partially true. Some don’t, and some do. But suburbia does not provide that choice, because even adjacent uses are contrived to be distant. The planning model that does provide citizens with a choice can be seen in the New England town pictured here. One can live above the store, next to the store, five minutes from the store, or nowhere near the store, and it is easy to imagine the different age groups and personalities that would prefer each alternative. In this way and others, the traditional neighborhood provides for an array of lifestyles. In suburbia, there is only one available lifestyle: to own a car and to need it for everything.
Adjacency versus accessibility: thanks to the code requirements for walls, ditches, and other buffers, even nearby shopping is not reachable on foot
The traditional town: its organization allows citizens to choose how close they wish to live to shopping and other mixed uses
THE CONVENIENCE STORE VERSUS THE CORNER STORE
The suburbanites’ aversion to living close to shopping is strong. For a number of years, Miami-Dade County, Florida, has permitted developers to place up to five acres of shopping in their otherwise exclusively residential subdivisions, but that option has never been exercised. County planners point to this as evidence of the undesirability of retail. Actually, this tendency arises not out of an aversion to retail per se but from a loathing of the form that retail takes in suburbia: the drive-in Quick Mart. Many planners can tell horror stories about attempting to place a store in an existing residential development, only to have the terrified neighbors threaten civil action. While these designers may be proposing a traditional corner store, what the neighbors are picturing instead is a Quick Mart: an aluminum and glass flat-topped building bathed in fluorescent light, surrounded by asphalt, and topped by a glowing plastic sign. It’s not that these people don’t need convenient access to orange juice and cat food like everyone else; they just know that the presence of a Quick Mart nearby will make their environment uglier and their property values lower.
The suburban debasement of the corner store: plastic signs and parking lots
The 7-Eleven as designed by Norman Rockwell: a retail building that is compatible with its residential neighbors
But what if the Quick Mart were really to take the form of a traditional corner store? Judging by popular reaction