Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [37]
For people to walk, a neighborhood has to be interesting: not terribly so, but enough to convey some notion of human activity. Nothing interests humans more than other humans, and architecture that fails to express the presence of humans is unsatisfying to the pedestrian. This fact accounts for the lack of interest in this image, whose prevailing message is not “People live here,” but “Cars live here.”
The house pictured below, from Stuart, Florida, is not a skillful piece of architecture. It is neither historic nor modern, and has improperly sized shutters and awkward proportions. Yet it is a pleasure to look at, because everything that this house communicates pertains to human activity. It sits close to the street with windows facing forward, establishing the owner’s presence in the house. The picket fence, rather than serving as an unfriendly barrier, represents the owner’s care for the small yard it contains. The little front stoop, however weak, dominates the composition, because the garage has been moved to the back of the house, in this case on a rear lane.
The distinction between these two images represents not an architectural flaw but a planning flaw: on a fifty-foot-wide lot, no architect is talented enough to overcome the requirement that two thirds of the façade must be dedicated to garage doors. On narrower lots, the situation is exacerbated. The only way to free narrow-lot houses from the aesthetic burden of the garage is to place it at the rear of the lot, and the most efficient way to access a rear garage is through a rear lane, or alley. Most people who have lived in older communities are familiar with alleys, which contribute significantly to the beauty of places such as Savannah and Boston’s Back Bay, as well as a number of suburban neighborhoods from the early twentieth century.
The alley is often criticized for its lack of neatness, but that is its essence: it’s where all the messy stuff goes. From garage doors to trash containers, transformers, electrical meters, and telephone equipment, the alley takes them out of public view, something that is all the more necessary these days with the advent of recycling bins and cable TV boxes.au Also, by handling many of the neighborhood’s underground utilities, alleys allow streets to be narrower and to be planted with trees, which becomes difficult when water, sewer, gas, electricity, cable, and telephone are all placing demands on the front right-of-way. Alleys are also appreciated by the fire chief, since they allow firefighters another path to the building. Alleys may also provide direct access to backyard granny flats, giving them an address independent of the main house.
The city of garages: the typical suburban condition of housefronts dominated by car storage
The city of people: placing the garage at the rear allows the housefronts to reflect human habitation
A rear lane at Kentlands: where the garage doors and trash cans should be
Like narrow streets, alleys are often illegal in suburban jurisdictions and must be reintroduced with care—and sometimes by stealth. The first time that we designed a neighborhood with alleys, we had to label them “jogging paths” to get them approved.
In addition to the ill effects of the garage door, new subdivisions often fail to generate pedestrian activity because they lack variety. The endless repetition from lot to lot of the same house type makes walking utterly unrewarding. As Jane Jacobs put it: “Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.”5 The solution to the cookie-cutter condition, as already mentioned, is to place buildings of different size and type side by side, something that has been taboo for years. One can hope that the financial success of those new neighborhoods that mix housing types will eventually overcome the inertia