Web Exclusive, Back to the Future, How to improve your town
By: Ben Brown; Source: AARP Bulletin Date Posted: 2006-09-07 14:05:00-04:00
Louisiana and Mississippi asked for help redesigning their towns and cities after hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Prominent among the recruits was Andres Duany, a principal in the planning and architecture firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) and a founder of the New Urbanist movement, which emphasizes pedestrian-oriented neighborhoods. The AARP Bulletin asked him how older residents fit into his approach.
Q: Why were older citizens particularly affected by the hurricanes?
The degree to which people suffered had less to do with their age than with the choices available to them. Older people with limited means and those with health problems that limited their mobility were especially at risk. But so were poor people of all ages.
Q: How does the sort of planning you advocate address the choice problem?
One obvious way is it broadens the choices of how citizens get around. In Mississippi and Louisiana, as in almost all of America, the only practical choice now is the automobile.
Q: So you want to eliminate cars?
Not at all. This is America: we love our cars. But cars should be one of several alternatives for getting where we want to go as opposed to being a condition of existence. As we get older, most of us would rather drive less. But the way we've designed communities in the last 50 years requires a car to participate in day-to-day community life. So surrendering our car keys means going into exile in retirement communities.
Q: Mass transit could take years to put in place, which doesn't do much for older people stranded without cars right now in Mississippi and Louisiana—or, for that matter, in communities everywhere.
First, let's remember that planning requires thinking five, 10, 20 years ahead. Immediately after a disaster, you might have to focus temporarily on immediate needs, but you can't avoid consequences in the long term for the decisions we make in the short run. There is going to be a future.
Q: What would you like to see in the future?
It's fairly clear that with rising fuel prices, other transportation alternatives should be part of the mix. But we don't have to wait 20 years or invest billions in transportation infrastructure for what New Urbanists promote as the oldest, most cost-efficient mobility alternative: walking. What robs us of that choice is a series of bad zoning decisions since World War II that segregate buildings and whole districts by use: You live in one place, go to work somewhere else, and shop and entertain yourself in another place. We want to offer chances for the corner grocer, the coffee shop, the dry cleaners and other ordinary and necessary enterprises to locate within walking distance of a mix of housing and offices. We like diversity within walking distance.
Q: It sounds like an older city neighborhood.
Precisely. That's the not-so-secret secret of New Urbanism. It's the Old Urbanism lost to memory for most young people. But people who came of age before the 1960s know exactly what we're talking about. That's one reason why we think older citizens are going to be natural supporters of our approach.
Q: Is that what's happening in Mississippi and Louisiana?
We discovered that the destruction created a sense of urgency. Whole towns have to be rebuilt. So the option of doing nothing—the default setting for most places—was off the table. We could immediately get down to a discussion about what people wanted their rebuilt neighborhoods and towns to be like and how they were going to achieve that. Given a choice, people were excited about creating walkable, mixed-used environments that represent true urbanism. And that's the sort of plans we delivered in a very short time.
Q: Are those plans being implemented?
In Mississippi, we produced plans for 11 communities and three counties, including some regional approaches to transportation. In most of those communities, at least some of the plans are already in some stage of implementation. If you're looking at a complete plan for a post-Katrina community—one that visually depicts everything from neighborhood center locations to the widths of sidewalks and roads and one that lays out specific recommendations for coding that achieves community design goals—chances are it's a plan created by one of our teams or at least influenced by New Urbanism.
Q: Since this kind of planning takes years to produce dramatic results, what can we expect right away?
For one thing, a new approach to affordable housing. More and more middle-class families are being priced out of the housing market. The disparity hits people on fixed incomes especially hard. The hurricane zones in Mississippi and Louisiana offered us a kind of laboratory where these trends were instantly accelerated and magnified. In Mississippi alone, more than 65,000 homes were damaged or wiped out.
A team of architects designed emergency housing that was attractive enough to be an asset to any neighborhood. We ended up with a whole plan book of beautiful, small-scale designs that could be built on-site or in factories. We think the smallest one, slightly bigger than 300 square feet, can be built for $40,000 or less with excellent materials.
Among the beneficiaries of this revolution in affordable housing will be older Americans looking for fine small homes that afford independence without busting their budgets.
Q: What can communities that aren't starting from the ground up take away from this?
Not all of the places we're working with were scraped clean by the storms. For many, the rebuilding challenge is about repairing tears in the community fabric, including tears that were already evident before the hurricanes. We encourage communities to pay attention to their most beloved neighborhoods, streets and buildings and then to demand that new designs and construction echo those patterns.
How do you know you've succeeded? When downtowns and neighborhoods are welcome places for the very young and the very old, even when they're not surrounded by the protective armor of an automobile. If you build a place that's great for children and seniors, you've increased the chances that it's great for everybody.
Disaster Plans: Slow Going (September 2006)
Evacuation Plans: No Friend Left Behind (May 2006)
Rep. Peter King: 'No Local Plan, No Federal Money' (November 2005)
Katrina Survivors Try to Rebuild Their Lives (October 2005)
Back to Main Article (October 2005)
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