Suburban Nation - Andres Duany [98]
—Witold Rybczynski, author of City Life and The Most Beautiful House in the World
“Suburban Nation provides a marvelously detailed critique of suburbia as it exists, a landscape most of us are intimately familiar with but few of us have thought much about … Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck write surprisingly pithy, elegant prose, and Suburban Nation is full of juicy insider observations drawn from the Orwellian world of suburban planning.”
—Andrew O’Hehir, Salon
“[A] bold and damning critique … [This] visionary book holds out hope that we can create ‘places that are as valuable as the nature they displaced.’”
—Publishers Weekly
“I am convinced that the explosion of urban sprawl over the last fifty years has played a part in the breakdown of America’s civic engagement. Suburban Nation calls on all of us to revolutionize how we use politics and public policy to shape our built environment—our local homes, towns, and cities—and ultimately the public life of our own communities.”
—Congressman Sam Farr
“Lucidly detailing the environmental, aesthetic, and social costs of sprawl, the authors deliver a passionate, stylish manifesto on community quality of life.”
—Megan Harlan, Entertainment Weekly
“This book packs a powerful punch: The city of the future turns out to be the old neighborhood. Sprawl, the dominant pattern of the past, doesn’t have to be the wave of the future. Whether or not you subscribe to all of its arguments, Suburban Nation draws attention to the need to radically rethink the way our cities grow—both in our inner cities and on the urban edge.”
—Andrew Cuomo
“A book of luminous intelligence and wit. The fiasco of suburbia has never been so clearly described. This is not just a manifesto on architecture and civic design but a major literary event.”
—James Howard Kunstler, author of The Geography of Nowhere and Home from Nowhere
APPENDIX A
THE TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT CHECKLIST
This book describes the qualities that distinguish Traditional Neighborhood Development from suburban sprawl. While some of these distinctions are either too subtle or too complicated to be easily summarized, the following checklist represents an attempt to distill the book’s arguments into a brief, easy-to-use document.
This list was compiled with a particular type of project in mind: the development of a new town, neighborhood, or village of twenty-five acres or more. Many of its criteria apply both to smaller projects and to inner-city rehabilitation, but not all. For example, the mixture of housing types—from apartments to mansions—is appropriate for a new suburban development, but perhaps not for a downtown site surrounded by high-rises. The list would need to be significantly modified for inner-city use.
This checklist can serve different groups in different ways. It allows developers to review their current plans to determine whether they can expect to realize the market premium that has been demonstrated to accrue to TNDs. It enables planning officials to determine whether submitted plans are likely to provide the social benefits associated with TNDs, in order that they may qualify for incentives such as automatic permitting or increased density allocation. Of course, municipalities that truly wish to implement the policies represented by this list should take the additional step of legislating a Traditional Neighborhood Development Ordinance, as described in Chapter 11.
There are always exceptions, but the majority of Traditional Neighborhood Developments correspond to the majority of the rules that follow. All these principles have a significant impact on the quality of a development, but those marked with an asterisk (*) are essential and nonnegotiable.
THE REGIONAL STRUCTURE
—Is the TND location consistent with a comprehensive regional plan that preserves open space and encourages public transit?*
—Is the TND connected in as many locations as feasible to adjacent developments and thoroughfares?*