Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [87]
But this is not enough. People regularly tell us that “we’ve won”; the problem is that no one seems to have told the developers. While there is a broadening consensus that neighborhoods are preferable to sprawl, dozens of new housing subdivisions, shopping centers, and office parks break ground daily. Clearly, something else is needed if we are to stop sprawl any time soon.
Toward that end, we offer this final chapter as a call to arms and a brief primer on stopping sprawl. But first, it is important to point out that there are essentially only three tools for manipulating the physical environment: design, policy, and management. It is important to recognize which tool can effect which results. Crime, for example, is an urban problem that responds to all three tools. Design: public spaces can be organized to be easily monitored by people in the surrounding buildings, to eliminate hiding places for would-be attackers, and to exhibit a high standard of civic care through the use of beautiful and durable materials. Policy: zoning regulations can require buildings to have entries and windows facing public spaces, to populate those spaces and make them easy to supervise. Management: the neighborhood cop, on foot or on bicycle, can get to know neighborhood residents and visitors and develop a personal relationship with the adolescents of the neighborhood.
In this book we have explained a variety of design techniques that can either create or destroy community. Our town planning practice is based on the understanding of these techniques, but we have also come to understand that, alone, they are insufficient. Policy and management can work hand-in-hand with design to ensure results or, likewise, can conspire to make such results impossible.
For example: if trash is strewn about your street, the problem is not one of design but one of management. It is the responsibility of local government. If people are speeding down your street, however, that is more complicated. Most likely, people speed because the street is too wide. Street widths may be determined through local municipal standards, which may have been predetermined by a county or state standard, which in turn may have been prepredetermined by a national labor union standard. In our attempts to reduce speeding in Dade County, we were repeatedly frustrated by a huge street-width standard based upon the maneuverability of fire trucks much larger than the county’s low-rise neighborhoods required. When we asked the county why it didn’t buy smaller fire engines for such neighborhoods, we were told that the firefighters’ union requires a minimum number of firefighters per truck, regardless of truck size. Given this requirement, the fire chief had long ago determined that efficiency was best served by purchasing only the largest trucks. Through a circuitous chain of events, the desire of firefighters for job security resulted in speeding on neighborhood streets.
Very often, unsatisfying physical environments are the unintended result of such complex interactions, whose unraveling may be long and costly.dk In such cases, we must remember that all three tools of design, policy, and management are at our disposal. As designers, we sometimes forget that the best way to make lasting change is often to identify and act upon the policies that make good design impossible to implement.
THE ROLE OF POLICY
From local zoning codes to federal automobile subsidies, there is a long list of regulatory forces that have proved destructive to communities in unexpected ways. Because government policy has played