Friday, October 01, 2004
Sustainable Communities Conference
This week I'm back to traveling quite a bit, though it's for conferences and not my usual store visits. On Thursday I drove to Chicago for Sustainable Communities: Learning from the Dutch Experience. It was held Thurs and Fri at the Illinios Inst of Technology, hosted by the incredibly nice folk at the Dutch consulate and sponsored by Chicago Architecture Foundation.
The premise is that Chicago is going through major renovation and change in the coming years. Condos and dense housing will be required in the city. Managing urban renewal in the face of suburban sprawl will continue to be the city's challenge. Green and Sustainable building holds much promise for solutions and creative thinking. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Chicago planners want to look to urban design in Holland as a model for sustainable building. The Dutch consulate facilitated this meeting of leading thinkers from both countries.
I go nuts for this sort of thing because the more I study bookstores, the more I realize how intertwined local economies, employment, housing, and urban planning are to determining the success or failure of a community.
It's too simplistic to say communities need to support and value an independent bookstore when they have one. A bookstore can't survive if the community isn't healthy in these other areas.
Here are my rough notes from the day:
Peter Land spoke very convincingly on the need for 1-4 story housing instead of larger skyscrapers. His main points were the need to keep housing at a human scale. He also rejected the current trend to celebrate flashy superstar architect buildings over modest, well-designed architecture that is livable and improves the quality of life of residents.
Bill Odell gave a great presentation on his work studying the effects of urban sprawl on a once-rural area west of St Louis. It was important to see the true effects when a housing development turns a quiet stream into a wastewater drainage ditch. This happens almost everywhere in the suburbs. A key seed he planted was the damage stormwater, runoff from city streets, can cause on an ecosystem. He differentiated rain and stormwater, "Rain water is created by God, Storm water is created by man." Rain can easily be absorbed by an ecosystem, but storm water requires transportation out of the community to a water treatment plant, then back into the community. Very unsustainable. Odell's research is based on the Belle Hall Study for a potential project in South Carolina. The study showed the differences between a Sprawl model and a Town model. The sprawl model isolates housing into subdivisions and retail into malls and strip malls accessed by cars. The Town model relies on mixed-use zoning with housing and retail intermixed. Odell repeatedly told the crowd that now is the time for planning land that is 30 or more miles from urban centers. He said it was too late for land that is 10-30 miles, it's already been purchased and plotted by the developers. Plans are already underway for these areas, even though many are still vastly empty. But we can make changes for the land beyond this sprawl.
John Norquist, former Milwaukee mayor and current New Urban proponent in Chicago, is possibly a genius and definitely needs to speak more to business leaders and housing developers everywhere. He presented a slide show detailing the requirements for holding retail merchants and other businesses accountable for improving the commercial buildings and landscape in a community.
One of the phrases I heard many times through the day was "Built Environment" or "Built Fabric" to refer to the geographical landscape of a city. I think it's a nice phrase to evoke the beauty that is possible in an intelligent town plan and the role architecture has in shaping our community.
A new phrase I heard from Kees Christiaanse was the dutch reference to a city home as an "Urban Farm". The idea is that modern city dwellers are creating their living spaces to resemble a Farm model more than a traditional house model. People use their apartments or condos to conduct all of the necessary tasks of modern life. We use our homes for personal and business matters and treat the home as a center for our life, much like farmers conduct all of their essential tasks on their homestead.
Even though I had to miss the second day of the conference, I'm glad for the insights into urban planning I was able to see. I think particularly the work of John Norquist and the New Urbanists holds a lot of promise for the future of Main Street retailers.
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The premise is that Chicago is going through major renovation and change in the coming years. Condos and dense housing will be required in the city. Managing urban renewal in the face of suburban sprawl will continue to be the city's challenge. Green and Sustainable building holds much promise for solutions and creative thinking. Instead of reinventing the wheel, Chicago planners want to look to urban design in Holland as a model for sustainable building. The Dutch consulate facilitated this meeting of leading thinkers from both countries.
I go nuts for this sort of thing because the more I study bookstores, the more I realize how intertwined local economies, employment, housing, and urban planning are to determining the success or failure of a community.
It's too simplistic to say communities need to support and value an independent bookstore when they have one. A bookstore can't survive if the community isn't healthy in these other areas.
Here are my rough notes from the day:
Peter Land spoke very convincingly on the need for 1-4 story housing instead of larger skyscrapers. His main points were the need to keep housing at a human scale. He also rejected the current trend to celebrate flashy superstar architect buildings over modest, well-designed architecture that is livable and improves the quality of life of residents.
Bill Odell gave a great presentation on his work studying the effects of urban sprawl on a once-rural area west of St Louis. It was important to see the true effects when a housing development turns a quiet stream into a wastewater drainage ditch. This happens almost everywhere in the suburbs. A key seed he planted was the damage stormwater, runoff from city streets, can cause on an ecosystem. He differentiated rain and stormwater, "Rain water is created by God, Storm water is created by man." Rain can easily be absorbed by an ecosystem, but storm water requires transportation out of the community to a water treatment plant, then back into the community. Very unsustainable. Odell's research is based on the Belle Hall Study for a potential project in South Carolina. The study showed the differences between a Sprawl model and a Town model. The sprawl model isolates housing into subdivisions and retail into malls and strip malls accessed by cars. The Town model relies on mixed-use zoning with housing and retail intermixed. Odell repeatedly told the crowd that now is the time for planning land that is 30 or more miles from urban centers. He said it was too late for land that is 10-30 miles, it's already been purchased and plotted by the developers. Plans are already underway for these areas, even though many are still vastly empty. But we can make changes for the land beyond this sprawl.
John Norquist, former Milwaukee mayor and current New Urban proponent in Chicago, is possibly a genius and definitely needs to speak more to business leaders and housing developers everywhere. He presented a slide show detailing the requirements for holding retail merchants and other businesses accountable for improving the commercial buildings and landscape in a community.
One of the phrases I heard many times through the day was "Built Environment" or "Built Fabric" to refer to the geographical landscape of a city. I think it's a nice phrase to evoke the beauty that is possible in an intelligent town plan and the role architecture has in shaping our community.
A new phrase I heard from Kees Christiaanse was the dutch reference to a city home as an "Urban Farm". The idea is that modern city dwellers are creating their living spaces to resemble a Farm model more than a traditional house model. People use their apartments or condos to conduct all of the necessary tasks of modern life. We use our homes for personal and business matters and treat the home as a center for our life, much like farmers conduct all of their essential tasks on their homestead.
Even though I had to miss the second day of the conference, I'm glad for the insights into urban planning I was able to see. I think particularly the work of John Norquist and the New Urbanists holds a lot of promise for the future of Main Street retailers.
