Here’s an update on the evolution of Miami 21, discussed in my recent articles in Crosscut and seattlepi.com.
Category: sustainability
comparative urbanism, part 4 (gathering places, video edition)
Three classic experiences of urban vitality, from my personal collection.
A classic walk through Campo dei Fiori
A pan of consummate urban vitality in Piazza Navona
More from the Piazza Navona minstrels and nightlife
“A Better Way to Zone” comes to Washington Friday: a myurbanist exclusive, for now
In A Better Way to Zone, published last year by Island Press, Don Elliott, an accomplished Denver land use colleague, consultant and attorney, opens with “Zoning is not a sexy topic”. Obviously, he has not yet spent enough time in Washington State! This Friday, Don and I will share the presentation linked below at the annual conference of the American Planning Association’s Washington State Chapter, in Vancouver, Washington.
I first wrote about Don’s book in the July 14 seattlepi.com. The book’s subtitle is straightforward and foreshadows a direct approach: “Ten Principles to Create More Livable Cities”. Don spends some 220 pages on how zoning was supposed to work, and what went right and wrong. By page 137, he offers the ten principles of a better way to zone:
1. more flexible uses
2. the mixed use middle
3. attainable housing
4. mature areas standards
5. living with nonconformities
6. dynamic development standards
7. negotiated large developments
8. depoliticized final approvals
9. better webbing; and
10. scheduled maintenance
Don is not the first to surgically analyze the zoning tool and prescribe repairs. But in straightforward style, he offers each of his principles as specific “fixes” for patterned lessons of the past. And as someone who has worked in several major American cities and in developing countries, his “evolutionary… governance picture of the future” is based on experience as well as insight.
help with learning more about TOD, part 2
The initial myurbanist post on transit oriented development (TOD), highlighted two recently released reports. Here is an additional resource, a Powerpoint summary presented in Olympia about a month ago, which outlines findings after investigation of top barriers to vibrant urban centers and TOD in the University of Washington/Quality Growth Alliance “From Barriers to Solutions and Best Practices” report.
As also noted in the post, the recently released Futurewise/GGLO “Transit Oriented Communities: A Blueprint for Washington State”, provides an applied analysis of what makes for successful development around transit stations and general guidance for future legislation.
from 1911, the Bogue plan of Seattle speaks
Somehow my father–an urban planning professor–once obtained the copy of the the 1911 Bogue Plan of Seattle owned by J.W. Maxwell, who served on the Municipal Plans Commission representing the Seattle Clearing House Association as a member of the Plan’s “Location, Width and Girth of Arterial Highways Committee”.
For many years, I have used the Plan as a coffee table provocateur. But after seeing the sidewalks in Greenwood last night after the votes came in, I took a new look–and saw some messages from history.
The Plan is a classic “City Beautiful” document of the era, emphasizing the grand boulevards of a Civic Center never achieved, new, numbered highways and rapid transit, parks and port facilities, premised on “the development of the Civic Idea, old as the human race”–building to accomodate future population.
After all, Virgil Bogue was an engineer of some repute and veteran of railroad and port design and construction. For him, the Civic Idea was building, constructing and rehaping–beginning with the “testimonies of the dim ages” which brought us “earth mounds of America and the lithic structures of Stonehenge”.
Nearly 100 years later, we struggle with the legacy of such plans, and how to achieve their unrealized grandeur while remaking their Robert Moses outcomes. Bogue did not mention walkable neighborhoods, compact development or much green outside of large parks. Many would call the vision bold, yet hardly sustainable.
Still, he left a message–facing the Plan’s title page and reproduced below–reminding Seattle always to dream.
