Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [34]
The suburban development pattern contributes to crime in other ways as well. The single-use zoning system means that many areas are occupied only during certain times of the day. Apparently abandoned, residential subdivisions invite all sorts of misbehavior. Further, the suburban auto orientation means that few people are ever out walking, and nothing undermines the perception of safety more than being alone. It is a vicious circle: the less safe streets feel, the fewer people walk, and the less safe they become.
COMFORTABLE STREETS VERSUS UNPLEASANT STREETS
People don’t like to walk where they don’t feel safe, nor do they like to walk where they feel uncomfortable, which is slightly different. While many factors contribute to the comfort of a place, the most significant is probably its degree of architectural enclosure—the amount that it makes its inhabitants feel held within a space. The desire for enclosure stems from several sources, among them the fundamental human need for shelter, orientation, and territoriality. Whatever the cause, people are attracted to places with well-defined edges and limited openings, while they tend to flee places that lack clear definition or boundaries.aq For this reason, the most effective technique for designing successful urban spaces is to think of them as outdoor living rooms.ar To feel like a room, a street must have relatively continuous walls, whose design calls attention to the space as a whole rather than to individual buildings. That is to say, street walls must be primarily flat and simple.
The California jog: the unpleasant public space that results from wiggling walls
Unfortunately, architects have been working for decades according to the mandate that building walls should not be flat and simple. They were taught that, as much as the budget will allow, walls should stagger up and down and wiggle back and forth so that each house reads as an independent object. However, as pictured above, all that this individuation accomplishes is to remind the residents of how many identical houses there are. More important, the oscillation of the wall plane effectively destroys the roomlike quality of the public space in front, so that the people who live in these units tend to flee indoors soon after cutting their car engines.
The traditional alternative: flat street walls in Georgetown provide an attractive sense of spatial enclosure
The lower image consists of essentially the same housing product as the upper one. They both contain roughly the same size of unit, the same quantity of asphalt, the same cars, even the same gray sky. Yet the dwellings pictured below sell for about three times as much, and that’s with spotty wiring, antiquated plumbing, and inconvenient parking—residents consider themselves lucky to find a spot within sight of their house. Why are the inhabitants of Georgetown paying so dearly to live there? Because the sense of place is excellent. The continuous flat building wall, with its harmonious and quiet architecture, creates a feeling of enclosure and comfort that is not found in suburbia.
The North Dallas Special: a single house attempts to create the skyline of an entire village. It is meant to stand alone
This is not an academic conceit. When Americans pull out their wallets and pay triple the cost for the same commodity, developers should take note. The most irksome aspect of this comparison is that it actually costs less money to provide the more desirable alternative. With their continuous walls, fewer corners, and simple roofline, these buildings are considerably less expensive to build than their hyperactive counterparts.
Homebuilders at the upper end of the market appear to be equally misguided in their approach to building design. Pictured here is what has come to be known as the “North Dallas Special,” or, less affectionately,