Last year, Lake Wales scored two headlines on the same day: One lauded LW for reconnecting to its Olmsted roots (for the #LakeWalesConnected downtown plan). The other screamed that "one of the most imperiled Olmsted legacy landscapes faces new threats" (from ill-conceived sprawl). The followup #LakeWalesEnvisioned initiative is about getting the city’s big picture for future growth (and its form) back on track. Yesterday, I got to introduce #LakeWalesEnvisioned to the national audience of the Olmsted Network as part of their "Conversations with Olmsted" series! My short presentation begins at about 9:00 min in the video. —Victor
Street-Oriented Architecture (TPS Ep. 11)
Perhaps the key distinguishing feature between vibrant urban places and the drab scenes Jim Kunstler once called “the geography of nowhere” is this:
Places where people like to be always have street-oriented architecture. The buildings are engaged with the street in some legible, designed way; there’s an indispensable building-to-street relationship that feels mutually reinforcing.
Anatomy of a main street storefront building
The street space, that “public room,” extends from building face to building face—so the way individual buildings are designed affects, and even creates, the experience we have in that space. Many traditional building types, lot layouts and architectural grammar evolved as they did for precisely this reason; they dependably create a good experience and present each building to its neighborhood in a respectable manner.
For example, porches within conversational distance of the sidewalk give houses a neighborly sociability, and provide an agreeable intermediate layer of space between the fully public street and the fully private interior. On intimate streets of rowhouses, stoops and dooryards leave no doubt about where the front façade of the building is.
The finished floors of most rowhouses in Old Town Alexandria are elevated above the sidewalk level for privacy.
In most cases, an elevated finished floor level on the first inhabited floor is useful because it gives the interiors of rowhouses and ground floor apartments an extra degree of privacy and dignity, offsetting the fact that they are so close to the public realm. If you’re walking by outside along the sidewalk, and the inhabitants have their curtains and shutters open, you might see their chandelier, but you won’t be staring at them sitting on the couch or seeing what they’re watching on television! You won’t feel like an intruder, and they won’t feel intruded upon. But here’s an important caveat: In our times, we also need to be sensitive when applying this traditional detail, by also making accommodations for accessibility and visibility. The traditional elevated finished floor makes access difficult for those in wheelchairs or with mobility impairments, so shared ramps, lifts, zero-step entrances into spaces below the piano nobile, slightly elevated alleys, and roll-in lobbies can all be employed.
Storefront buildings on King Street in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia. Small details of architectural grammar matter.
On commercial and mixed-use streets, well-designed storefronts are the key. Consider the anatomy of a traditional Main Street building. Again, the details of architecture intermediate between the public spaces and the private interiors. Awnings, arcades, colonnades, galleries and other appurtenances help us deal with the sun and rain, but they are also ways the architecture reaches out, engages with, and embraces the street space. On the most successful streets, there’s always a clear front door to each building, facing the street. Having frequent doors along the street reinforces the scene.
On main streets, mixed-use buildings should usually have an expression line just above the ground floor, such as a cornice or eyebrow, forming a base that separates the private upper floors from the public world of the commercial street scene below.
#WhatNotToDo
Now, compare all that to deep setbacks, parking lots in front, or to rows of garage doors and “snout houses,” and to blank walls. This soul-destroying pattern became commonplace in late 20th Century suburbia, yet it’s never been shown to work well at making a people-friendly place or street scene—not even once! By contrast, in traditional urbanism, pleasant streets and street-oriented architecture support each other, time and again. When the streets are hostile, we’ll invariably find buildings retreating from the street, recoiling, turning their backside toward the neighborhood.
#whatnottodo
Chattanooga. Photo: Kenneth Garcia
It’s not a style thing. Every architectural style, including modernism, has fine examples of street-oriented designs.
Street-Oriented Architecture: It’s number 11 on my list of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know. Check out Episode 11 of the series, and please share, comment, and subscribe. --Victor
The Power of Street Trees (TPS Ep. 10)
Main Street, Greenville, South Carolina
There’s one detail that makes a huge difference in the public realm, and that’s the humble street tree.
Landscape architect Henry Arnold once said, “Fifty percent of urban design is, street trees.” On a tree-lined street, look up; the canopy forms the ceiling of our shared public room. Arnold wrote, “An urban street without street trees is like a building without a roof.”
Cours la Reine, Paris
Shaping space while lending beauty, order
The Ladd’s Addition neighborhood in Portland
Line street trees up, and something magic happens. A tree-lined street is a deliberate intervention, an ordering of the public space, a statement in the common human language of geometry. It never fails to make a place where more people want to be.
One tree, many benefits
However, street trees are not just about making the place more beautiful and ordering the space, but also:
Shade - They shade our walks and bike rides. Street trees can lower the urban heat island effect, by as much as three to seven degrees Fahrenheit.
Legare Street, Charleston, South Carolina
Value - They make the city more economically potent. Two identical houses in otherwise similar neighborhoods will command wildly different prices, if one is on a tree-lined street and the other isn’t.
Water - They hold stormwater and clean up pollution.
CO₂ - Critically, they sponge up carbon dioxide, a key greenhouse gas tied to global warming, and then they make oxygen—and we breathe that stuff!
Missoula, Montana
Lower Cooling Costs - In summer, trees shade the buildings and that lowers cooling costs, as much as 35%, and they cut glare, leaving a delightful pattern of dappled light on our streets.
Place, Brand - Flowering trees and autumn leaves put on spectacular annual shows, drawing us to these places.
Troy, New York. Kenneth García photo
Warmth - And in winter, in temperate climates, deciduous trees lose their leaves to let light in to warm the sidewalks and buildings.
Traffic Calming - They keep us safer, calming traffic.
Habits can be broken
For part of the twentieth century, the street tree tradition faded amid compacted city soil, bad habits and poor assumptions. Convinced— by examples with meager, incorrect planting pits—that urban trees will never thrive and they’ll die young, decision-makers began to question whether they were worth the effort and expense. Public works officials started trimming budgets with the old line, “We’ll add the trees in a later phase.” Some minimalists, seeing starkness as a virtue, pulled their architecture away from trees into wide-open displays. Some landscape architects and arborists began to oppose traditionally aligned trees with close spacing, arguing that this geometry was too formal and dissimilar from the way certain trees grow in the wilderness, and pointing out that the roots under each tree need substantial space. They were willing to forgo the benefits and visual effects of allowing the upper branches to intersect with those of the adjacent trees and having more continuous shade for pedestrians. During the same period, departments of transportation were focused on speeding up and accommodating more cars rather than slowing them down. So they started to see shade trees as a liability, insisting on flimsy “frangibles” instead of the sturdy oaks, maples and elms customary in times past.
Get the planting details correct
Generous planting areas on the avenues of Chicago, Illinois
The turnaround came as landscape architects like Arnold and others realized that, with the right planting details and species choices, urban trees can indeed thrive. Much depends on the preparation of the hole in which the tree will be planted. For example, for the Live Oaks common on streets here in Florida, one key is not only allowing for a larger area of loosened soil below ground for the primary roots seeking water, but also for a larger open area up top around the tree, where fine hair-like roots seek air and filtered sunlight. Our landscape architect Jay Hood specified an innovative planting system for Park Avenue in Winter Park that freed the tree trunks from tight wells with metal grates and allowed for walkable surfaces to float above the roots and loosened soil below. Those trees have defied all expectations and grown quite tall. Many people are surprised to learn they were planted so recently.
In the last couple decades, new techniques and products have emerged to improve the success of street trees in urban areas where space is tight and impervious surfaces predominate. So-called “structural soil” and underground suspension systems have become common. These allow the roots to spread within loosened soil without ramming into excessively compacted earth, yet they solve the problematic lifting of sidewalks.
Green Blue Urban’s tree root system, undergoing installation in Thomasville, Georgia. Rick Hall photo
On wide boulevards and leafy residential streets where trees can be planted in linear, continuous landscape strips, your crew can dig a long trench for the whole tree line rather than individual circular holes. After planting and backfilling (avoiding too much compacting), this produces a larger area of loosened soil for the roots to explore. Naturally this requires thinking ahead about the alignment of underground utilities, drainage, and other details. Bottom line: Consult a competent professional on the right way to plant your street trees.
Beautiful exceptions: Cour du Commerce Saint-André in Paris, and Calle Malasia, in Buenos Aires’ Belgrano neighborhood
Exceptions to the rule
For all the reasons we’ve reviewed, on most of our streets and in most of our communities, we’re better off with lines of street trees, especially in temperate, moderately humid climates. But there are exceptions to this rule. For example, extraordinarily arid places where water is scarce or costly call for other solutions to supplying shade and visual interest, such as narrow streets with buildings brought closer together and cantilevered architectural elements that encroach beyond the building envelope. Fewer trees can also be best for far-north climates where letting more sun in during the many shortened days outranks having shade on the rare warm day. Even in a sunny place where trees grow easily, we might still opt for a unique, skinny, tree-less street here and there in a neighborhood plan, to diversify the addresses and experiences on offer. There are also many kinds of commercial streets and passages, and not all require shade trees; some replace the canopy effect with suspended fabrics, galleries, or portals; others establish the visual interest with creative signs and artwork or palms or flowers instead of shade trees. With or without trees, we also take care to keep clear lines of sight to signage and storefronts on mercantile streets. In Street Design, we also wrote about the usefulness of what Raymond Unwin called the “lean-in” tree, planted in the adjacent garden instead of within the right-of-way.
As with every other detail in city design, context is crucial.
Standard equipment for great cities
When they’re right, they’re right, which is most of the time—so street trees are not just a decorative frill, something to be cut when the budget’s tight. They’re mission-critical equipment in making good, resilient cities and towns, and that’s why they’re number ten on my list of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know.
For more information, check out my TEDx talk (it’s a love poem to street trees), and read what John Massengale and I wrote about “The Seven Roles of the Urban Street Tree” in Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns, or read Henry Arnold’s classic, Trees in Urban Design. --Victor
Episode 10 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is all about street trees. This episode is illustrated with photos, diagrams and video from Yellow Springs, Ohio; Rochester, Buffalo, Brooklyn and Manhattan, New York; Barcelona, Spain; Washington, DC; Guilin, China; Stockholm, Sweden; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Paris, France; Greenville, SC; and Miami, South Miami, Coral Gables, Lake Wales, and Winter Park, Florida. Next episode: Street-Oriented Architecture.
Pont Street, London
Walkable Street Design: 5 Must-Haves (TPS Ep. 9)
People first
The latest episode of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is about street design. That’s because all successful towns are walkable, and design is the key to that. Design for pedestrian safety and happiness simply can’t be an afterthought, merely considered—if at all—only after all the automobile-related decisions are already made.
Bologna, Winter Park, and Rome
“Walkability,” in this context, is really a stand-in word for pedestrian friendliness and bike-friendliness and accessibility for all, including folks in wheelchairs or with other mobility challenges. Walkable streets don’t just technically allow for people outside cars, they’re welcoming, attractive, less stressful, and livable. A perfunctory sidewalk right next to whizzing cars or a faded painted stripe indicating a bike lane are definitely not enough.
Main Street, Galena IL
Main Street and its environs, Galena IL
Design is indispensable
We should start with walkability as an essential baseline, and then work our way out to all the other considerations like truck access, parking and the like. That’s because the best streets are more than mere transportation corridors—and more than just functionally walkable rights-of-way. When their designs are artful, these streets become unique addresses, places where people especially want to be. Streets need what Steve Mouzon calls “walk appeal” in order to inspire citizens, ignite commerce, and attract real estate investment. Eminent urbanist Allan Jacobs, who inspired generations with his book Great Streets, pointed out that some thoroughfares can even mature into the ranks of what he termed the “great world streets,” distinctive landmarks that endure and set their cities apart from their peers.
Good or great, streets come in many sizes and designs. Immense variety is possible. Upcoming episodes of Town Planning Stuff describe the eleven fundamental street types, and as we’ll show, there are many, many variations on each.
Commonwealth Avenue, Boston. C. Podstawski photo
Five basic features
While there are many options in street design, we find there are a few must-have features always present in people-first streets. These features dependably draw people—and these are features your elected officials can demand in your town. That demand usually has to come from both the grassroots and from the top. As former longtime Charleston mayor Joseph Riley has said, “The mayor is the chief urban designer of the city.”
Rue St. Jean, Quebec: Shaped, comfortable, connected, safe, memorable
First, good streets are shaped. The street space is given a designed form, like an outdoor public room, with the roadway and sidewalk its floor, the buildings its walls, and, sometimes, its ceiling formed by the tree canopy.
Second, they’re comfortable. In most climates that means shaded in the summer. Street trees, and architectural elements like porches, arcades and awnings, moderate the elements.
Rue St. Jean in the evening
Third, they’re connected. They lead somewhere. The streets that feel like what Kaid Benfield calls “people habitat” are usually hooked into the larger network, linked to the rest of the town.
Next, they’re safe. That means you aren’t stressed out about getting run over by a vehicle, because motoring speed is slower by design. You’re also safer if you have what Jane Jacobs called “eyes on the street.” The safe street isn’t faced by blank walls, but by doors and windows and porches and balconies and storefronts.
Lastly, the streets where people really like to be are memorable. They make lasting impressions because beauty surrounds us and human creativity is on display, in architecture and art and signs and landscape design. An artful spatial design, with composed vistas, ratchets up these powerful impressions.
“Umbrella Sky” on Giralda Street, Coral Gables
Walkable street design: It’s #9 on my list of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know. For more information, subscribe to the Dover Kohl YouTube channel, or read the book John Massengale and I co-wrote, Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns. --Victor
To illustrate many of the ideas in Episode 9, we used downtown West Palm Beach's premier street, Clematis Street. Here’s a closer look at our design for its reconstruction: Safe, Slow, Curbless, Shaded, Adaptable.
Every Neighborhood Should Have These Five Things
This one’s all about neighborhoods: Episode 5 of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know reached screens Monday, May 11, 2020 via social media and our YouTube channel, and it includes some striking animations by Alex England, Kenneth Garcia, and Pablo Dueñas.
Neighborhoods are the basic building block of a city or town.
In 1929, Clarence Perry documented what he called “The Neighborhood Unit.” His classic diagram remains useful; it’s been updated several times since, including in the early 1990s by Gary Greenan and Lizz Plater-Zyberk for AIA Graphic Standards, and again in 2007 for Doug Farr’s book Sustainable Urbanism.
Clarence Perry’s “Neighborhood Unit.”
When you have one neighborhood standing alone among the farms or in the woods or the wilderness, that’s a village. When growth leads to several of these neighborhoods positioned tightly together, you get a town, and, with even more neighborhoods, a city. In this way, small towns and big cities like Paris or New York or Washington are all cities made of neighborhoods.
Neighborhoods: the fundamental unit of city building.
The five crucial ingredients
Neighborhoods vary a lot, but they have five basic characteristics. We keep these in mind when planning a new neighborhood or when carefully updating or restoring an existing one.
Compact, complete, connected, convivial.
First, a proper traditional neighborhood has an identifiable center & edge. You know when you’ve arrived at the heart of a neighborhood; large or small, it almost always has a deliberate, consequential public space, shared by all. You will typically find a square or plaza, and a noteworthy civic building or landmark (and in the best examples, some locally-serving commerce). Edges, on the other hand, vary greatly. While historically a fortified town might have had a wall for protection, that has thankfully evolved to more inclusive and welcoming physical identifiers. The boundaries between neighborhoods might simply take the form of a mixed-use main street shared by several adjoining neighborhoods, forming a “seam” instead of a seal. Or the edge can be a greenbelt of parkland, forest or farmland, or a water body, or a transit or greenway/trail corridor, or some other feature. All that being said, centers are arguably much more important to the neighbors’ well-being than the edges; the centers are where the bonds of community are most firmly formed.
Second, the neighborhood is limited in size, about five minutes’ walk from center to edge. That’s an easy distance to navigate without driving. It’s also an amount of territory that is easily mentally mapped, committed to memory in great detail, and in an area this size people come to know many of their neighbors. Parents in traditional neighborhoods tend to allow their children greater freedom to roam for these reasons. Five minutes’ walk results in a radius of about a quarter of a mile, but that’s a rough measurement only; neighborhoods are almost never circular! Perry’s neighborhood unit envisioned idealized neighborhoods at a size of about 160 acres, but in practical application we find traditional neighborhoods range from about 40 acres to about 300 acres. Larger sites are designed as multiple neighborhoods. Although there are many ways their edges are defined physically, real neighborhoods don’t extend endlessly across the horizon.
Next, it has a mix of land uses & building types & housing types and prices. That variety allows for some of life’s basic daily needs to be satisfied within the neighborhood. (More on this coming up in Episode 7, on mixed land uses.) An old rule of thumb says, if you can buy a quart of milk within 5 minutes walk, that’s a more livable neighborhood. That’s also a neighborhood where you’re more likely to walk or bike, burning calories instead of fossil fuels. We don’t use the term “neighborhood”to describe vast, standalone precincts of a single land use, like tract house subdivisions, apartment complexes, office parks, or shopping centers. Variety in the housing types and sizes welcomes a wider range of households and income levels, making it possible to blend generations, improve inclusiveness, and to avoid socially harmful concentrations of poverty.
Fourth, the neighborhood should also have an integrated network of walkable streets. Making the streets connected, beautiful and walkable are all key to fostering a healthy culture of physical activity, making public transit viable, creating great addresses that add value to real estate, and more. (Episode 8, on the public realm, and Episode 9, on walkable street design, will cover this in more detail.)
Last, the neighborhood should have some of the best sites reserved for civic purposes, like public buildings, places of worship, parks, squares, and gathering places. These sites are the ones which are lent significance by the artfully composed geometry of the neighborhood plan itself; for example, a civic building is lent prominence by positioning it at the end of a street vista or facing a public square, communicating the importance of the shared institution inside it to the society that built the neighborhood. Public buildings and civic gathering places are crucial anchors that lend certainty in an unpredictable world, precisely because they are more permanent than the private houses or everyday workplaces— so these sites should be identified, set aside and protected from private development right from the beginning.
Neighborhoods: They’re fundamental, and they’re #5 on my list of #townplanningstuff everyone needs to know. —Victor
"Connect the Dots" virtual lecture draws huge audience
On May 4, 2020, Victor Dover delivered a “virtual lecture” for the Civic Conversations series, hosted by the Pensacola News-Journal and the Studer Community Institute. Quint Studer introduced Victor as “the Michael Jordan of urban planning” at the start of this extraordinary event, streamed live for an estimated 6000 viewers. The talk features an in-depth discussion of what makes housing expensive, and what to do about it, including how the costs of housing and transportation must be considered as a composite number, and examples of innovation from around the United States. The event concluded with a live Zoom Q&A moderated by Lisa Nellessen-Savage, executive editor of the PNJ.
TPS Ep. 4, Visualizing Change
The fourth episode in Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is about before-and-after thinking. To do planning and urban design you have to take a hard look at a place to see what’s there, and then imagine in your mind’s eye what it should be, in the future. And then, you have to draw it, somehow, and show it to others, and ask, “Is this what you envision, too?”
This is a visual process, it’s not just planning by the numbers. You have to make your visions visual to really communicate them. Advertisers have long known this; they love to depict the new and improved as compared to the old. Think of the TV commercials showing the dirty t-shirt “before” it’s washed in the new detergent, and how great it looks “after” their product gets used or their advice gets followed! Professionals and policymakers have long needed to apply that kind of communication more often to the big decisions about our built environment.
Historically, some of the most influential thinkers about design understood this well. Landscape architect Humphrey Repton painted garden scenes on two layers of canvas, gluing a hinged top layer depicting “before” conditions over a bottom layer depicting his proposal, so he could show the impact of changes with the turn of a canvas flap. John Nolen, the first American to refer to himself as a professional city planner, titled his book “New Towns for Old,” capturing the before-and-after essence of his visions.
Way back in the 1980s, Joe Kohl, Erick Valle and I saw a TV news report about surgeons who were using crude video imagery to show trauma patients how their faces might look after reconstructive surgery. Before, and After. We thought, what if we could do the same thing to help heal the disfigured American city? That few seconds of television changed the course of our lives. We launched our “Image Network” company— the outfit that over time became our town planning practice— with an emphasis on visualization. We got pretty good at it. Those early contracts to produce electronic simulations and communication tools thrust us in front of the whole range of influencers who really decide what happens in our designed environment, from mayors, planners, architects, developers, and engineers, to preservationists, environmental advocates, economists, housing experts, retail experts, and community activists. We quickly got exposed to how all these folks think, and had to learn to translate among them.
But in those first years we gradually realized, and had to confront, a few key things. One was that most decisionmakers, including architectural designers, are terribly unskilled at envisioning how their abstract plans and elevations will actually turn out once built in the real world, such as how big or small the buildings would be, how the streets would feel, and how their new construction fits (or doesn’t) with its context. Another finding: Once we created effective simulations that showed their projects in the cold light of day, warts and all, they often weren’t sure what to do about it to fix the flaws. We felt the need to transition to leading the design and planning process, rather than just reacting to it as illustrators, after all the big decisions had already been made by someone else. Influential teachers like Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Mark Schimmenti, Geoff Ferrell and Jaime Correa taught us about urbanism, and we set out to rebuild our practice around the principles they introduced into our studio.
Today, whenever we propose changes to a street scene or a neighborhood, we use drawings and computer imagery to show how the place you know could be transformed over time, new and improved into a better place. We urge planners to think of plans less like a static map and more like a movie, which changes as you go along. It’s about thinking through change over time, whether the changes are gradual or dramatic and disruptive. This helps community leaders and investors make better choices.
Visualizing Change Before it Occurs: It’s #4 on my list of town planning stuff everyone needs to know. New episodes post each week; please share them, subscribe to the Dover Kohl YouTube channel, and let me know what you think. —Victor
Ep. 2, The Importance of Design
The second episode of Town Planning Stuff Everyone Needs to Know is now on the Dover-Kohl YouTube channel. This short new installment introduces a crucial topic: why we can’t overestimate the importance of design, versus mere policy planning.
If you only know the land use or the density or the setbacks or the required number of parking spaces, you won’t know whether a development is good for the neighborhood or bad. In the video, we compare two places. The density? The lot size? The land use? All are exactly the same. But I’ll bet you’d prefer to live in one of them, and not the other.
The design is even more crucial than the land use. The character of a street scene comes from the building-to-street relationships, the landscape, the shape and quality of the public spaces, and the texture and proportions of the architecture. If your little lot or parcel presents a blank wall or a parking lot as its face toward the public realm, that will make everybody less likely to walk or bike or use transit—so small decisions have regional implications.
Design matters. That’s #2 on my list of town planning stuff everyone needs to know. Let us know what you think of the episode, watch for another one next week, and please subscribe to the Dover Kohl channel on YouTube. —Victor