How to proceed with due diligence for redevelopment during challenging economic times?
Here is a Powerpoint presented on January 7, 2010 in Vail, Colorado at the Law Education Institute/Colorado Bar Association National CLE Conference which outlines basic approaches and issues:
Often efforts to reinvigorate commercial centers are theme based, and in the winter resort context, a common goal is to achieve the look and feel of an European alpine village amid expensive condominium residences and retail opportunities. Here, the redevelopment of the Lionshead area of Vail, Colorado provides an almost cartoon setting to a slope-side environment.
How could alternate designs and materials achieve a cohesive sense of place without imposing a fantasy upon the preexisting setting? Is this another instance of the issues first raised in the “nothing can come of nothing” discussion recently reposted from seattlepi.com?
A fascinating narrative, borrowed from a planetizen link:
We complete our new year’s retrospective with a compendium which first appeared in seattlepi.com on June 19, 2009, with updated links and enhanced photos added.
Eight blog entries later, some trends, concerns and observations have complemented almost 25 years in the trenches of environmental and land use law.
Four points emerge from what began in April entries focused on an inventory of “lessons learned from the development boom” amid 2009’s unprecedented attention to integration of transit and land use and provision for compact and walkable communities.
• “Who pays” for new infrastructure, innovative forms of development and placemaking, and public/private development features surrounding transit will rank highly–competing with attention to climate change as a determinant of how we will grow in the future.
• Overuse of buzzwords such as “sustainable” and “green” must yield to meaningful and implemented end-goals. Political spin or business generation hyperbole will not guarantee financing to accomplish a shared vision towards avoidance of urban sprawl and global warming.
• Silos must go. Laudably, the increasingly savvy Obama administration’s Sustainable Communities Initiative continues to lead the charge to marry land use, transportation and environmental issues.
• When we envision compact, walkable communities close to workplaces as the new ideal, we are imposing a particular point of view on many who either do not want or cannot afford to live in this manner.
Recent travels documented last week yield a fifth point. Let’s be careful with inspirational examples from overseas. We may want walkable cities, vibrant urban spaces and the allure of hilltowns…
The quintessential urban space, Campo di’ Fiore
Night meeting at the Pantheon
Gourdes, Provence, France
….yet adaptation of development forms from other contexts or places in history risk Las Vegas, Leavenworth or facades not built to last. Our malls and commercial spaces are not Rome’s Campo di’ Fiore, nor are new urban centers Rome’s Pantheon.
Las Vegas: The Paris, context askew
Las Vegas: The Venetian, replete with the automobile
We should emphasize the qualities and characteristics we seek, but remember our history is short and contextual and cannot recreate what evolved over thousands of years.
In summary, in this time of opportunity, substance, please, and to quote Shakespeare in King Lear, “nothing can come of nothing”.
We begin the new year with observations which first appeared in seattlepi.com on May 25, 2009.
To quote a Cylon or two in Battlestar Galactica: “This has all happened before. And it will happen again.”
Not unlike the new urbanist and smart growth dance to reshape the role of the automobile in urban areas, the recently concluded remake of the 1970’s television space opera entertained us from 2003 until this year with the eventual union of arch-enemy human and machine to seek a common framework for a better tomorrow.
In our much-reported post-Growth Management Act local dance rendition, our region seeks locally walkable and transit linked communities in order to reduce carbon footprints and redefine the role of the automobile.
As noted on May 7 and May 14, this utopian quest is often expressed primarily in design terms, with a de-emphasis on particular land uses in favor of desirable and appropriate building forms for a given urban sub-area.
Let’s not forget that public rights of way, (particularly streets, underlying and adjacent infrastructure and how they relate to surrounding uses), are also at the center of our attempts to tame automobile dependence and bring European pedestrianism and transit-oriented centers to Puget Sound. Many urban designers conclude that the key focus rests with wide and malleable sidewalks as the precursor to successful redevelopment.
Indeed, throughout recorded history, governments have used streets as a versatile private property management tool. With utilities flanking and buried under streets since ancient times, such conduits have often been seen as more important than the property on both sides.
Scholars trace the role of streets as the central regulating determinant of surrounding land use to Greek boundary stones which defined public space with inscriptions such as “I am the boundary of the agora”, to the layout of Roman military camps. Similarly, the reappearance of the wheeled vehicle and public marketplace in medieval times demanded, in modern parlance, adequate surrounding infrastructure. The industrial revolution demanded rectilinear transit patterns and yielded the late nineteenth century Garden City precursor to today’s green ideals.
Early twentieth century American planners struggled with how to assure new alternatives to simple gridded urban development. The neighborhood unit theory and examples from the New York City region in the 1920’s and 30’s were rediscovered in the past 20 years and spurred renewed debates about the value of curvilinear streets v. gridded streets, and neighborhoods which look inward on themselves with an internal open space focus.
Today’s planners must continue to use the street as a legal and planning tool to govern neighborhood form and appearance but also assure a functional layout that integrates pedestrians and multiple types of vehicles. Topics for continued consideration and merger include determination of: 1) desirable and appropriate building forms and interaction with public rights of way; 2) hierarchies of public rights of way; 3) the appropriate separation of pedestrians and vehicles; and 4) how to manage speed and noise with traffic control devices, public education, law enforcement and vehicle redesign.
We remain at a literal and figurative crossroads as we struggle to preserve quality of life and safety, and to achieve energy conservation and offset climate change.
We are not the first in history to attempt a reorientation of human and machine, nor will we be the last. “This has all happened before. And it will happen again.”