Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [17]
Palmer Square is an unusually satisfying place because it contains, in close proximity, all the destinations of daily life. The workplace is an especially vital component here because it contributes to the viability of the shops by providing a daytime customer base for cafés, restaurants, and convenience shopping. It also offers employees the option of living in the same neighborhood where they work, a benefit that is not lost on New Jersey’s weary commuters.
Mashpee Commons, after: reclaimed by the forces of urbanity
Offices above shops constitute one of the traditional urban workplace building types. In suburbia, the workplace is typically located in the office park. The accompanying illustration of a proposed office park, not so far from most workers’ reality, stands in startling contrast to Palmer Square. This artist’s rendering was presumably commissioned in order to make the project as attractive as possible. Unfortunately, the image is immediately suspect, for the artist has included something that is only a theoretical possibility: a pedestrian, flanked on one side by a vast parking lot and on the other by a barreling semi. Can one imagine that this person would actually choose to be there?
Palmer Square, Princeton: shops and restaurants below offices and apartments
The standard suburban office park: offices and parking, but nothing to do at lunchtime
Pedestrian activity in such an environment is a fantasy. It feels unsafe, because there is no layer of parked cars or landscape to protect the pedestrian, physically and psychologically, from the onrush of traffic. Also, it is an incredibly boring place to walk, as the only distraction is provided by the grilles of the cars in the parking lot. Most important, it is a good bet that the pedestrian is not within easy walking distance of any destination worth walking to.
Whether or not one accepts the presence of a pedestrian in this scene, it is worth considering the quality of life of a typical employee in this office park. She can get to work only by car. Her valuable lunch hour provides precisely two choices: she can either eat in the company cafeteria or do what most people do: spend twenty-five minutes out of sixty fighting traffic in order to rush through a meal at a chain restaurant. In Palmer Square, workers are able to walk out onto the street and choose from a dozen local restaurants and cafés, enjoy a proper meal, and then use the extra time to run errands or just sit in the sun on the square. It may not be crepes on the Rive Gauche, but the Palmer Square experience makes the office-park lunch hour seem bleak indeed.
USELESS AND USEFUL OPEN SPACE
What do the suburbs offer that might compensate for what appears to be a compromised quality of life? Many people would say that the suburb’s main advantage over the city is its generous provision of open space. Identified as a way to ensure a healthy environment, open space is mandated in copious quantities by suburban codes, and there is a long history behind this requirement. Nineteenthcentury city planning wisely promoted landscape as a solution to a widespread urban health crisis. By the mid-twentieth century, this approach had generated an image of the ideal city as fully integrated with the natural environment, made up of vast conservation areas, continuous waterways, agricultural greenbelts, recreational trails, frequent parks, and yards surrounding every building. But, like many modern planning ideals, this one, too, has come to life in a dramatically compromised form. In today’s conventional suburbs, man’s relationship