Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [60]
4. Designate the Corridors. Corridors are the regional-scale elements that serve both to connect and to separate different areas. They can be natural or man-made, and include waterways, wildlife corridors, continuous greenways for pedestrians and bicycles, parkways for cars and trucks, and rights-of-way for rail lines. Rail corridor designations are particularly significant, as they provide an opportunity for transit-based development, the ideal way to organize growth. Whenever possible, future development should be organized along a transit corridor, in the manner of our historic streetcar suburbs.
5. Establish Priority Development Sectors, and an incentive program that eases development within them. The obvious goal here is to counteract the existing government and market forces that make it less profitable for developers to work in the city (“urban infill”) than on the rural “greenfield” fringe. Priority areas include, in order of preference: urban infill sites, suburban infill sites, existing and future rail stops, urban extensions adjacent to existing neighborhoods, and major roadway intersections. Ideally, approval agencies would accept development applications following this order. For example, any applications for urban extension should be put on hold until all applications for urban infill are processed.
6. Establish a proactive permitting process for development that follows the neighborhood model, such that developers proposing complete neighborhoods—or completions of existing neighborhoods—within the developable area are assigned a municipal regulator. This official, rather than creating bureaucratic friction, would be charged with walking the project through an accelerated process. Getting permits for neighborhoods must be understood to be considerably easier, quicker, more predictable than getting permits for sprawl. These neighborhoods must comply with an eligibility review based upon an objective instrument such as the Traditional Neighborhood Development Checklist, included in Appendix A. Or better yet, they should be permitted according to a new zoning ordinance specially written to encourage mixed-use neighborhoods, such as the Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance, discussed in the final chapter. This pro-neighborhood policy must apply to all sites, whether in a Priority Development Sector or in the temporary Countryside Reserve.
A healthy city as the basis for a healthy region: expansion occurs in the form of complete neighborhoods (Drawing by Thomas E. Low, DPZ)
7. Designate all other types of development as districts, to be permitted only through a rigorous public process of documentation and justification. Districts are sectors where a single use dominates, typically because a thorough mix of uses is not practical. Acceptable districts focus on civic, medical, or educational campuses; large or noxious agricultural or industrial facilities; depots or terminals; and entertainment zones. Undesirable districts include the components of sprawl: housing subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks; such unjustified single uses should ideally be prohibited, but designating them as districts would at least make them more difficult to develop than neighborhoods.
8. Fairly distribute the Lulus. Locally Undesirable Land Uses range from the dramatic (garbage dumps and power plants) to the mundane (the large high school made noxious by the traffic it generates). Affordable housing, homeless shelters, and other facilities serving the poor are often the most hotly contested of Lulus; everyone agrees that they are necessary, and they also agree where to put them: in someone else’s neighborhood. Responsible regional