Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [75]
MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT
Regardless of location, a new neighborhood can avoid unduly contributing to sprawl by being of mixed use. At the bare minimum, every residential neighborhood must include a corner store to provide its residents with their daily needs, from milk to aspirin. While it is only a start, a small corner store does wonders to limit automobile trips out of the development, and does more than a social club to build the bonds of community.
The region idealized: new developments take the form of complete neighborhoods, either within the city or along existing transportation corridors (Drawing by Thomas E. Low, DPZ)
The corner store should be constructed in an early building phase. It will not, at first, be economically self-sufficient, due to the small number of houses around it. It should not be expected to turn a profit until the neighborhood matures, and for that reason the retail space should be provided rent-free by the developer as an amenity, much in the way a conventional developer would construct an elaborate entry feature or a clubhouse. Since it can be very effective in marketing real estate—if properly staffed with a gregarious busybody—the corner store is a fairly easy concept for enlightened developers to understand.
Up-market: the corner store / office building in the new village of Middleton Hills, Wisconsin
To witness the range of possibilities, one might consider corner stores in two recent developments. In Middleton Hills, a new neighborhood just outside Madison, Wisconsin, the developer—a protégé of Frank Lloyd Wright—built a sophisticated Prairie Style structure that houses a corner store, a community center, a post office, and a walk-in medical clinic, which helps pay the rent. The corner store/café contains an espresso machine and a wide selection of gourmet specialty items. If anything, it errs in being too upscale for its middle-class clientele, but that situation will surely change as the neighborhood grows and the shopkeeper responds to demand for everyday items.
Down home: the corner store / shopkeeper’s house in the new village of Belmont, Virginia
At the other end of the spectrum is the corner store in Belmont, Virginia, which is simply an expanded single-family house, in the ageold tradition. The shopkeepers live upstairs and have not required a developer subsidy. The store is stocked with touching precision to match the neighborhood’s needs, so much so that it buys seven PowerBars each week to satisfy one resident’s daily habit—a small-scale exemplar of “just in time” inventory. Each child in the neighborhood holds a five-dollar charge account, to be used at will, thanks to the autonomy they gain from living in a pedestrian-scale community. Complete with a television and sleeping dogs, the store may not be an architectural masterpiece, but it serves its purpose.
The corner store is, of course, only the first step toward a true mix of uses. A neighborhood-scale shopping center may be appropriate for a larger population or when adjacent to through traffic. Such a concentration of retail—around 20,000 square feet, including groceries, dry cleaner, video rental, and other daily needs—should be designed as part of any large development in anticipation of future demand. Any town plan with two neighborhoods or more should include such a town center, which is built when there are enough citizens to make it viable.
A mixed-use neighborhood also includes places to work, the more the better. Perhaps the smallest, aside from the home office, is the