Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [76]
Ideally every neighborhood should be designed with an even balance of residents and jobs. While this flies in the face of convention, it is not impossible to implement. All that is needed is for the housing and commercial developers to agree to work in the same location with a coordinated plan. When there is only one developer for both, it is even easier. Riverside is a new Atlanta neighborhood recently built by Post Properties, a company large enough to develop housing and office space at the same time. Their first phase of construction included a quarter-million square feet of office space and two hundred apartments, all of which were rented immediately at rates 40 percent above the market average. Pictured at right is the main street, which terminates on a square fronted by street-level shops and cafés. The immediate success of this experiment has convinced Post to stop building suburban sprawl, and to focus its efforts on high-density mixed-use developments, including projects in the inner city.1
Shops, offices, and apartments: the Main Street in the new neighborhood of Riverside, Georgia
Plan it and they will come: eighteen years in the making, the school at Seaside
A common criticism of “forcing” the workplace into residential areas is that, even though the workplace is near the homes, it is not near the homes of the people who work there. This assertion may be true at first, but not over the long run. There is no doubt that most of the workplace in new towns will be staffed initially by people who commute from some distance away, just as most of the new houses will be occupied by people with steady jobs elsewhere. But the study of older communities shows that this relationship improves within a generation. When they can, people will relocate their home or business to be near their business or home. It is the planner’s imperative to offer them the opportunity to do so. cw
Criticism of traditional town planning can be shortsighted, as it presumes that fully integrated communities can be conjured up overnight. True towns take time; a designer can only provide the ingredients and conditions most likely to lead to a mixed-use future. Eighteen years after it was planned, Seaside just built its first school, but has yet to build its town hall. Those critics who question whether Seaside should bother continuing to reserve space for a town hall are the same people who initially scoffed at the idea that it should also include a school. But the developer Robert Davis ignored the nay-sayers, and now the children of Seaside can walk to school.
Which brings up the final component of mixed use: civic buildings. After housing, shops, and workplaces, civic buildings are a required element for any new community. Indeed, land should be reserved for them at the most prominent locations, such as a high ground, a main intersection, or the town square. Larger civic buildings—city halls, libraries, churches, and the like—require the most patience, as they are typically the last to get built, but they must be planned for if they are to exist at all. In the meantime, smaller civic buildings such as the neighborhood recreation center or the bandstand on the town green square can serve as social centers and contribute to a sense of community identity.
The most important civic building is the neighborhood elementary school, which should never be more than a fifteen-minute walk from any home. This may seem a radical proposition these days, when schools seem to be sized primarily for the efficiency of the janitorial service, but there are many arguments in its favor. It has become clear that small schools are key to effective learning. Recent studies have demonstrated that schools with fewer than four hundred students have better attendance rates, fewer problem