In decades past, people often imagined a futuristic America of science-fiction proportions. Artists' renditions featured sleek, self-powered cars, and stark apartment complexes with uncomfortable-looking furniture where the inhabitants would sit at the end of the day to eat their protein pellets. But lately, architects and planners in the U.S. have developed a different vision -- one where the future looks more like the nostalgic past.
A wealthy few have put their ideas into concrete form, often building their ideal communities from scratch. The results -- Florida's Seaside resort community and Memphis' pleasant riverside Harbor Town neighborhood -- are touted as just the beginning.
In one long, exhaustive day of conferencing in Austin recently on "New Urbanism: Creating Community in Cities and Suburbs," 550 planners, architects, developers, lawyers, environmentalists, neighborhood activists, and others listened to theories, debates, and success and failure stories in the hopes of learning to manage Central Texas' burgeoning growth without turning the region into a series of renegade suburbs and strip malls.
And by all indications, Austin is well on its way to developing a practical urban growth plan via the efforts of the 22-member Citizens' Planning Committee (CPC). Over the last year, the CPC has been working on revamping the city's vision of land use planning, transportation, neighborhood representation, and regional growth planning. The buzzwords that accompany each CPC meeting here in Austin were plentiful at the conference -- "new urbanism," "scenario planning," "neo-traditionalism," "edge city." But there's nothing "neo" about the desired end result -- the sort of neighborhood in which middle-class whites lived during the pre-Levittown early 1950s. Kids playing in the street, under the watchful eyes of neighbors from their front porches. Corner stores and churches landmarking the ends of tree-lined boulevards. Neighborhood schools, sidewalks, family hardware stores passed down through generations.
It's the sort of neighborhood that urban planning advocates urge a return to, albeit with more ethnic and class diversity than the first time around. Beyond the quality-of-life issues, they say, suburban sprawl has led inevitably to vacant, decaying inner cities, where "downtown" becomes synonymous with crime and drugs, and property tax revenues plummet.
And while suburban residents may think they're escaping inner-city chaos, the design of their communities destroys even their sense of security. Miami architect Victor Dover cites studies alleging that suburbanites feel more isolated and vulnerable than city dwellers. They know few of their neighbors, and their kids become dependent upon a carpooling parent for the simplest activities. The average American household, Dover says, makes 14 car trips a day, at about 10 miles a trip -- trips to work, to get milk and bread, to get a video and take the kids to dance lessons. "Do we really have to get in our car to go to the ATM, get a Sunday newspaper, get an ice cream cone?" he says. "All those are very small things to put within walking distance."
It all began with the end of World War II, when the country was cash-happy and cars were cheap, according to CPC member and conference-goer Scott Polikov. Zoning regulations began to reflect a new American dream -- which one conference participant traces to the "cabin in a clearing in the woods" mentality. No longer could builders set houses and businesses in the same neighborhood. High-density complexes were largely nixed, and traffic planning focused on moving the highest number of cars along the road as fast and easily as possible. The result: the suburb as we know it.
And now, in the end, much of what planners at the conference want to do is either outright illegal, or so complicated as to be impossible under most cities' permitting processes, Austin included.
When the CPC's Community Vision Project brought 45 people together in February to develop a "new urbanism" plan for a mythical 29-acre site in Austin, they came up with parks large enough for baseball games, apartments above awning-covered storefronts, alleys for parking, and housing for elderly people. The sketches are filled with trees and common areas with ponds.
"We all want similar things -- good schools, a safe community," says Harve Franks, president of the J.J. Seabrook Neighborhood Association, who participated in the Community Vision Project. "It's very important to have mixed use, corner stores where children can walk to have an ice cream cone without worrying about their safety."
Thanks to developer and real estate input, it's all potentially profitable. And thanks to bank lending policies and city zoning, next to impossible.
"The city claims these are all attainable," says Kent Butler, assistant dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture and workshop participant. "And what we found was, yes, but there's no incentive. It would take an act of love to stay with something like this long enough to get it approved."
Scott Polikov envisions a series of incentives built into the city land code, encouraging developers who want to do the right thing to do so. While the possibilities are nearly infinite, Polikov cites "carrots" used by the city of Bellvue, Washington, as examples of what Austin could do. There, builders who create cafe-style setbacks, clear glass walls on the first floor for retail space, "through-ways" underneath buildings for pedestrians, off-street parking and transit programs, are allowed to build more stories on their buildings. "The whole point of the Community Vision Project is to explore what types of incentives would work in a community that's a little more spread out, like Austin," he says. "Already we have a lot of answers. Now we need to figure out how to apply them."
That, it seems, is always the hardest part. Conference speaker Alan Stewart spent a year trying to convince the city of Flower Mound, Texas, to create an exception to its Master Plan for his new-urbanism-style development near Dallas. He gave up last December after losing a public-relations war with nearby residents -- the people who should have been his allies. Even Austin has piles of visionary plans -- the 1928 City Plan, 1944 Moore Plan, 1977 Austin Tomorrow, 1958 Austin Plan, 1961 Development Plan, mid-1980s Austinplan, and so forth -- few of which will likely ever do more than collect dust.
But Polikov sees potential in the CPC process -- it's all in the approach, he says. In June, the Committee plans to repeat February's brainstorming session, but this time using three or four real sites in downtown, suburbs, and existing neighborhoods. He's hoping the summer session will include more bankers, who are often hesitant to lend money to new kinds of ventures. From there, it should be easier to show city councilmembers what sorts of land code changes are needed, Polikov says. Also, residents will have more than token input after the backroom decisions have been made; indeed, they will be an integral part of each step. Another Dallas developer, Robert Shaw, told conference attendees that from a bottom-line perspective, such participation is essential. "You get better results," he says. "It's a good and healthy thing, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
As the conference ended, and everyone filtered out to the cash bar in the Austin Convention Center lobby, there was still one unanswered question, which was asked repeatedly all day, but never addressed directly. New urbanism does not necessarily include affordable housing. For all the talk of diversity, it was perhaps the developers who were most realistic about such prospects. As each showed slideshows of their work -- talking about profits and financing -- it became quickly apparent that new urbanism is aimed at the people who would otherwise be moving to the suburbs. In other words, those who can afford the skinny row houses built by Memphis developer Henry Turley, starting around $130,000. Affordable housing and "new urbanism" are two different things, agrees Shaw, and it will only booby-trap urban planning efforts to try to address both problems within the same projects at this point.
Author and journalist Joel Garreau agreed. Poverty "is not a city problem, but a culture and a values problem. If we call it a city problem, they'll start paving to solve it," he jokes. "Redevelopment hasn't helped, it's only made areas safe for cappucino bars."
But Polikov doesn't think the discussion has to end there. "That's the challenge that's facing Austin, because there's a tendency toward gentrification," he says. "It's a very legitimate concern, and in the [CPC workshops] there'll be an exploration of ensuring the role of affordable housing.
"I don't think there are any answers yet," he adds.