Suburban Nation - Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Jeff Speck

Gems

• In the standard suburban office park, there's "offices and parking, but nothing to do at lunchtime."
• "Drivers passing through a well-designed residential neighborhood are made to feel that they are borrowing the street space from the people who live there."
• "Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal. Confronted by repetitive subdivisions, treeless collector roads, and vast parking lots, the citizen finds few public spaces worth visiting."
• "The best way to create real variety is to vary not the architectural style but the building type."
• Main street model: "Upstairs apartments [over retail] provide customers for the shops, activity for the street, and nighttime surveillance for the neighborhood. They also represent one of the most economical ways to provide housing, since the land and infrastructure costs are covered by the shops."
• The problem with garages on the facades of houses: "architecture that fails to express the presence of humans is unsatisfying to the pedestrian."
• Adding more lanes causes people to drive more, such that in the long run, the traffic congestion remains the same.
  • The reason is that latent demand for taking more and longer trips is huge, and always saturates new supply of traffic capacity.
• Cul-de-sac kid: "the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment."
• City's most attractive amenity: "public realm, with the vibrant street life that phrase implies. Such an environment is the compensation the city offers its customers for forgoing the suburban amenity package."
• "For planners, varied and idiosyncratic sites are actually easier to design, and much more interesting. While flat and featureless land gives few hints as to where to begin, a complex site tells the designer pretty clearly what it wants to be."

Intro

• There are beloved towns like Carmel, but over the past 100 years we've made places like that illegal to build due to building codes. E.g. forbidding mixed use.
• Will growth produce a "placeless collection of strip centers and office parks", or "real towns with real neighborhoods?"
• The problem is a lack of design. "We live today in cities and suburbs whose form and character we did not choose. They were imposed upon us, by federal policy, local zoning laws, and the demands of the automobile."
• (Is "good growth" (change in density) possible? NIMBYism is an understandable position, because within most cities and suburban communities, growth will make the existing environment worse)

What is sprawl, and why? (chap 1)

• Traditional neighborhood vs. sprawl:
  • Traditional: pedestrian friendly. Daily needs are within walking distance.
  • Sprawl: "carefully separated pods of single use." Daily needs are within driving distance.
• "The dominant characteristic of sprawl is that each component is strictly segregated from the others."
• Five components of sprawl
  • Housing subdivisions
    • "Subdivisions can be identified as such by their contrived names, which tend toward the romantic — Pheasant Mill Crossing — and often pay tribute to the natural or historic resource they have displaced."
  • Shopping centers, AKA big box retail
    • Usually these are places with large parking lots where no one wants to walk.
  • Office parks
    • "More likely to be surrounded by highways than countryside."
  • Civic institutions; schools
    • "In traditional neighborhoods, these buildings often serve as neighborhood focal points," but in sprawl they are "surrounded by parking, and located nowhere in particular."
  • Roadways
    • Since each activity of daily life is separated, we must drive to engage in each activity.
    • "Since most of this motion takes place in singly occupied automobiles, even a sparsely populated area can generate the traffic of a much larger traditional town."
    • There's a high pavement:building ratio.
• Sprawl is a result of well-intentioned public policies starting in the mid 1930s.
  • Mortgage loans for 11M homes.
  • Interstate highway program.
  • Neglect of public transit.
• As people moved out to the suburbs, so did retail, and then offices followed, so that workplaces could be closer to where people lived.
• Segregation of use through zoning became popular in the 1800s when factories were segregated from residential. This improved cities, because it resolved incompatible use. But then segregation was then inappropriately applied to all uses — even compatible ones — by city planners.
• In affluent areas, the sprawl can be executed with beauty, e.g. lots of greenery.
  • "This raises a fundamental point: the problem with suburbia is not that it is ugly. The problem with suburbia is that, in spite of all its regulatory controls, it is not functional: it simply does not efficiently serve society or preserve the environment."
• "The virgin sidewalk — the physical embodiment of sprawl's guilty conscience — reveals the true failure of suburbia, a landscape in which automobile use is a prerequisite to social viability."
• Planning codes are just words; no diagrams. They "have no clear picture of what they want their communities to be. They are not imagining a place that they admire, or buildings that they hope to emulate. Rather, all they seem to imagine is what they don't want: no mixed uses, no slow-moving cars, no parking shortages, no overcrowding. Such prohibitions do not a city make."

The devil is in the details (chap 2)

• "More than any other factor, the perception of excessive traffic is what causes citizens to take up arms against growth in suburban communities."
  • (This is not unreasonable. While cars provide mobility, their side effect is noise, ugliness, and a lack of peace and safety on the street. If these side effects can't be directly addressed, given the nature of cars, then less traffic does make the town a lot nicer.)
• Sprawl has more traffic because more people are forced to take cars — avg 13 trips per household per day — and the organization forces all traffic through a central collector road.
• Traditional neighborhoods are organized as webs, which reduce demand on collector roads.
• Retail: corner stores vs convenience stores
  • Retail in suburbia often takes the form of a loathed drive-in Quick Mart.
  • A corner store, by contrast, is desirable and raises property values.
  • They sell the same things. The difference is the "building typology." The corner store is built like house in the same style as the neighborhood and is situated directly against the sidewalk. Convenience stores are all glass, surrounded by asphalt, with a parking lot between the store and the street. And usually harsh fluorescent lighting. It puts cars before pedestrians.
• Shopping centers
  • Main street is a superior model to shopping centers. On main street, the retail is on the ground, and there can be apartments and offices above the retail. Parking is in the rear, in garages. The architecture is harmonious with the town. People can choose to live in the same neighborhood as their office.
  • "Credit for many main-street revivals is due to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Main Street Program, which provides funding and advice to communities across the country."
    • (It's nice that this is a thing.)
• In the standard suburban office park, there's "offices and parking, but nothing to do at lunchtime."
• Having offices on main street contributes to the viability of shops, because the workplace provides daytime customers.
• Office parks are incredibly boring places to walk, because it's all parking lot. It's the worst place to have a walking 1:1.
• Public open space requirements "have been reduced to a set of regulations that are primarily statistical. These requirements say little about the configuration and quality of open space."
  • Planning codes should provide as much detail and guidance for open space as they do for parking lots.
• Open space is often residual: it's made up of extra space between clusters of properties, rather than pooled together intelligently.
• "Sports fields are often designed ease of maintenance rather than for accessibility. As a result, they tend to be consolidated into excessively large parcels well beyond pedestrian range."
• The authors argue that curved streets and cul-de-sacs create a disorienting environment.
  • (That sounds reasonable. But I would guess the intent is a more organic and interesting landscape, where walking uncovers more behind the bend.)
  • The original intention behind these designs seems to have been to discourage strangers cruising around the neighborhood, to deter crime.
• To combat "boring endless vistas", streets on a grid can be slightly curved, so the view unfolds as you travel down the street.
• Traffic calming: the practice of using roadway geometry to improve safety.
  • "Drivers passing through a well-designed residential neighborhood are made to feel that they are borrowing the street space from the people who live there."

The house that sprawl built (chap 3)

• Private vs public realm
  • "Americans may have the finest private realm in the developed world, but our public realm is brutal. Confronted by repetitive subdivisions, treeless collector roads, and vast parking lots, the citizen finds few public spaces worth visiting."
• Argues nimbys would embrace growth if they could be shown that it will provide them with a gratifying public realm.
• On housing "clusters" within a subdivision: "there have always been better and worse neighborhoods, and the rich have often taken refuge from the poor, but never with such precision."
• The traditional neighborhood was a social condenser. E.g. the housing type might transition mid-block: apartments on both sides of the street, facing each other. Next to them, mansions on each side of the street, facing each other.
• "A society is healthier when its diverse members are in daily contact with one another." It's convenient if your doctor, teacher, and babysitter are all within a reasonable distance.
• "In a neighborhood, people buy the community first and the house second. The more a place resembles an authentic community, the more it is valued, and one hallmark of a real place is variety."
• "The best way to create real variety is to vary not the architectural style but the building type."
  • Superficial variation is not sufficient. It will have a "cookie cutter" feel.
  • Georgetown is a good example: the architectural style is consistent, but it feels varied because of the varied building types.
  • "It is often the consistent use of a single style that makes the integration of different building types possible."
• Mixed-use housing
  • "Upstairs apartments [over retail] provide customers for the shops, activity for the street, and nighttime surveillance for the neighborhood. They also represent one of the most economical ways to provide housing, since the land and infrastructure costs are covered by the shops."
  • Retail is usually only single story, and single story doesn't adequately define street space. Apartments above the retail gives the buildings needed height.
• Affordable housing
  • It should not look different from regular housing. "The last thing the poor need is a home that stigmatizes them as such."
  • "It should be distributed among market-rate housing as sparsely as possible in order to avoid neighborhood blight and reinforce positive behavior." E.g. a 1-in-10 insertion rate.

The physical creation of society (chap 4)

• "Community cannot form in the absence of communal space."
• "In the suburbs, time normally spent in the physical public realm is now spent in the automobile, which is a private space as well as a potentially sociopathic device."
• Authors argue that driving around in "isolation chambers" has caused a decline in conversation, politics, and getting along with others in the community.
• Why do people visit Disney Land? Partly it's because it actually provides a pleasant, pedestrian-friendly public space that most people lack in their hometowns.
• Traffic design
  • Streets have become "traffic sewers" rather than designed equally for car use and pedestrian use.
  • Streets were widened with the advent of the car to increase throughput, but this widening makes them less friendly for pedestrians.
  • Access requirements for fire departments are too onerous, and meeting these requirements unreasonably compromises the neighborhood street design.
    • "They put more weight on fire rescue than on the prevention of injury in general." Car accidents are far more common and deadly than fires.
  • Neighborhoods should be designed with narrow streets to encourage traffic calming.
    • Speed limits signs don't work. People will not drive slowly unless they feel unsafe speeding.
  • "The engineers' strict adherence to their manuals is actually promising; rather than convincing the engineers to fundamentally rethink their approach, we need only amend the manuals in order to reform the profession."
• Prerequisites for street life
  • Meaningful destinations easily accessible by foot.
  • Eyes on the street: "in order to discourage crime, a street space must be watched over by buildings with doors and windows facing it."
  • Architectural enclosure: the buildings along the street should make the pedestrians feel like they are "held within a space"; an outdoor living room.
    • (It seems to me that there's a tension between feeling like you're in nature vs. an urban setting. Taller buildings and narrow streets deliver a cozy urban feeling, but is this the only way? Can the neighborhood instead feel like walking through a garden or park?)
• Street trees
  • When the houses themselves fail to create a well-defined space, because they're spaced too far apart, evenly spaced street trees should be used. "The trees narrow the space and provide a natural value that contributes to the pedestrian's sense of enclosure and comfort."
  • Authors argue that landscape designers cluster trees in natural arrangements found in the wilderness, because a row of trees would be too boring. But the trees don't do anything to define space, so they're not helping the outdoor space feel more intimate or room-like.
• The problem with garages on the facades of houses: "architecture that fails to express the presence of humans is unsatisfying to the pedestrian."
• Alleys are a useful dumping ground for all of the things which aren't neat. They allow the front of the street to be clean.
  • "By handling many of the neighborhood's underground utilities, alleys allow streets to be narrower and to be planted with trees, which becomes difficult when water, sewer, gas, electricity, cable, and telephone are all placing demands on the front right-of-way."
• "The endless repetition from lot to lot of the same house type makes walking utterly unrewarding."

The American transportation mess (chap 5)

• Highways should connect towns but not pass through them. Cities should not grow along highways.
  • In Western Europe, "most highways provide views of uninterrupted countryside."
• Induced traffic
  • Adding more lanes causes people to drive more, such that in the long run, the traffic congestion remains the same.
  • The reason is that latent demand for taking more and longer trips is huge, and always saturates new supply of traffic capacity.
  • "Increased traffic capacity makes longer commutes less burdensome, and as a result, people are willing to live farther and farther from their workplace."
  • (Authors don't seem to acknowledge that building more roads does give people what they want; it's not wasted investment. If people can work farther away from their homes, their job options are much improved.)
• People may demand driving because many aspects of it are a "free good." They don't directly pay for roads, parking spots, and traffic infrastructure.
• "Government subsidies for highways and parking alone amount to between 8 and 10 percent of our gross national product."

Sprawl and the developer (chap 6)

• "If what you are selling is privacy and exclusivity, then every new house is a degradation of the amenity. However, if what you are selling is community, then every new house is an enhancement of the asset." - Vince Graham
• "When offered true community, buyers require no other amenity, not even location."
• Home builders are looking for gimmicks to differentiate their product against the competition. None of them focus on the neighborhood's context enough to offer "community" as a selling point.

The victims of sprawl (chap 7)

• Children lose their autonomy in suburbia; their mobility is only to the edge of the subdivision.
• Typically, one parent has to become the parent's personal chauffeur ("soccer mom").
• Cul-de-sac kid: "the child who lives as a prisoner of a thoroughly safe and unchallenging environment."
• Authors argue that kids living in suburbs contribute to teen auto deaths (because they must drive to achieve independence) and teen suicides, because of the isolating effect of suburbs.
• Driving skill declines with age. The dependence on autos makes the elderly "nonviable."
  • "As they lose their driver's licenses, the location of that house puts them out of reach of their physical and social needs."
  • The ideal setup for the elderly is a mixed use pedestrian friendly neighborhood.
• "Eighty percent of all suburban automobile trips have nothing to do with work at all, but are short drives to places that used to be accessible on foot, such as shops, schools, parks, and friends' houses."

The city and the region (chap 8)

• "Between one third and one half of urban America's land is typically dedicated to the driving and parking of vehicles. In Los Angeles, that ratio jumps to two thirds."
• Park-and-ride is not an effective form of mass transit. People don't want to exit their cars on the way to work. "If transit is to work, its users must start as pedestrians."
• "Regional planning" is the most useful quantum of planning, because the city and its surrounding suburbs are interdependent. E.g. how should a mass transit system be planned such that it can link all of these regions? However, there isn't usually a regional body to create such plans. Cities are too small, states are too big.
• No-growth movements
  • They don't last beyond one or two political cycles. It's naive to "presume that urban expansion can be stopped." Growth is inevitable.
  • Housing becomes scarce and prices rise. "Meanwhile, the potential profit to be made on new development grows so high that the building industry is motivated to mount a huge lobbying effort."
• Expansion should occur in the form of complete neighborhoods.

The inner city (chap 9)

• Prioritizing cars and developing interstate highways has withered the US's inner cities.
  • "The widespread construction of parking lots downtown further eased the automotive commute while turning the city into a paved no-man's-land."
• "A family or company moving to a metropolitan area has a choice between the city and the suburb, both of which are competing for its business."
  • Urban leaders rarely use this "outside-in" lens.
• Cities should not try to become more suburb-like. "The future of the city lies in becoming more citylike, more pedestrian-friendly, more intense, more urban."
• Amenities
  • Suburban amenities are yards, tennis courts, parks, green spaces, privacy.
  • City's most attractive amenity: "public realm, with the vibrant street life that phrase implies. Such an environment is the compensation the city offers its customers for forgoing the suburban amenity package."
• Suburban developments offer safety, and the appearance of safety: no graffiti, litter, or loitering.
• (Story about how Charleston SC eliminates graffiti: they cover it up the same day that it's reported, faster than vandals can create it!)
• HOAs are effective at maintenance because they're basically a hyper-local government. "Elective taxation is viable if the revenues are spent in proximity."
• Unlike European cities, most American cities have prioritized the car and allowed highways to the city's core, making the city unwalkable.
• A/B street system
  • A A/B system allows a city to have "high quality" uses on A streets, and low-quality (fast food, parking lots, auto shops) on B streets. If done carefully, pedestrians can walk on a connected series of A streets.
  • A/B is more realistic and tractable than trying to make every street an A street.
• The effective retail techniques that a mall employs can only be done if there's a centralized retail management firm that is responsible for things like the mix of stores. The author recommends such an entity for main street.
  • E.g. rent-free or subsidized anchor tenants, like cinema chains
  • "This should not be thought of as socialism for capitalists, or even as a subsidy, but rather as the city operating competitively within the reality of a cutthroat marketplace."
  • "Mutually supportive stores are clustered to form such places as fashion districts and entertainment districts."
  • The width of corridors in malls is kept to 50ft or less. This is easier to do in downtown if there are no cars.
• Don't put parking right next to anchor attractions like stadiums. Parking should be placed to maximize the street activity.
  • "Downtowns must be arranged cunningly, with a strategic separation of origins and destinations."
• Boring stores like banks, post offices, and real estate offices should be kept off the main thoroughfare, on a side street, or placed sparingly so there's not a stretch that's long enough for pedestrians to turn around.
• Pioneers to new urban developments arrive in this order:
  • Risk-oblivious: artists, college grads
  • Risk-aware: yuppies
  • Rise-averse: middle class
  • Each group needs different housing styles.
• City "master plans", so that each new building is not a permit battle.
  • "Most successful plans seem to share two qualities: first, they were completed through a fully open, interactive, public involvement process: and second, they includ ea physically based urban code that was passed into law."

How to make a town (chap 10)

• New towns should be either immediately adjacent to existing ones, or at the nexus of infrastructure or along a meaningful transportation line.
• Corner store per neighborhood is a top priority for limiting car trips out of the neighborhood.
• Corner store retail space should be provided rent free until the neighborhood matures, since it will not be profitable with the few initial houses that seed the neighborhood. Think of it as an amenity.
• Civic buildings: "Land should be reserved for them at the most prominent locations, such as a high ground, a main intersection, or the town square."
• Large civic buildings require patience, as they're typically the last to get built.
• A neighborhood's elementary school should be no more than a 15m walk for every house.
• The authors argue that more, smaller schools outperform large elementary schools and are a nicer experience for families.
  • "Schools have fallen prey to a 'bigger is better' strategy that simplistically champions economies of scale while ignoring the myriad secondary costs involved." (like busing costs).
• (I'm realizing that for me, the appeal of narrow streets isn't necessarily the traffic calming, but rather the reduction of asphalt. Asphalt is ugly and doesn't impart the impression that people live around here.)
• "Traffic generally treats the neighborhood the way that the neighborhood treats it. Friendly house fronts tell drivers to slow down, while blank walls and house backs tell them to speed up."
• "For planners, varied and idiosyncratic sites are actually easier to design, and much more interesting. While flat and featureless land gives few hints as to where to begin, a complex site tells the designer pretty clearly what it wants to be."
  • Don't bulldoze away the character of a landscape.
• 30mph roads tend to carry more cars than higher speed roads, because beyond 30mph, the cars spread out.
• "5 min walk" rule of thumb for the size of a neighborhood
  • "If one were to map the neighborhoods of most prewar cities, they would average about one-quarter mile from edge to center."
  • "Experience suggests that it is a distance short enough that most Americans simply feel dumb driving, making it a perfect rule of thumb for our auto-dependent times."
• The neighborhood center contains the highest density housing, transit stop, and shopping, and a public space like a plaza.
• As one travels from town center to its edge, "there is an authentic and gentle transition from culture to nature."
• A yield street: a single travel lane handles traffic in both directions. This is a naturally low-speed option for less traveled streets.
• "Houses should generally be placed close to the street in order to define its space, with fronts that are relatively simple and flat."
• "Setbacks should range from about ten feet near the neighborhood center to about thirty feet near the neighborhood edge."
• Sociable features like porches and balconies should be encouraged by excluding them from the setback calculation.
• Row houses which are directly on the street should be raised up two feet, for privacy — so pedestrians can't see over the window sill.
• Because of the high cost of garages, only taller buildings can afford them. So typically buildings are at most three stories or less, or ten and above, but nothing in the middle.
• "Mixed use means that a school and a cinema can share a parking lot, since they have complementary schedules; the same is true of an office building and an apartment house."
• Parking: "it is important to remember that where is more significant than how much, and that the quality of the street space comes first. An essential rule of thumb is to provide no more off-street parking than can be concealed behind buildings, and no more buildings than that amount of parking can support."
• Argues that the current architectural establishment rejects traditional architecture because each style represents some oppressive group that they don't want to associate with. Guilt by association.
  • "There now exist essentially three different types of architecture: cutting-edge modernist, authentic traditional, and a gigantic middle ground of compromise that includes lazy historicism, half-hearted modernism, and everything in between, most of which could be called kitsch."

What is to be done (chap 11)

• It's difficult for the public sector to develop enforceable policy which promotes community, because American ideology embraces individualism and property rights.
• Changes to policy are often resolved through expensive lawsuits. There are nonprofits that help prosecute these for environmental causes... there should be such a nonprofit for the built environment.
• "When we visit countries that — in marked contrast to the United States — actually develop and maintain their cities with an eye to past successes and failures, we can't help but conclude that the United States will soon find itself at a competitive disadvantage to Europe."
• How to innovate on building codes?
  • Old building codes cannot be modified easily because it creates a complicated mess. And old codes should not be thrown out wholesale, because the existing landowners will sue and win if they think their property value has been decreased as a result of changing codes.
  • So, cities could offer a parallel, visual building code as an optional alternative, and allow much faster and easier permitting for projects that adhere to that code.
  • Public benefit facilities like convention centers and stadiums should be planned by the public sector. The private sector tends to do a poor job integrating these into the town because they don't benefit from doing so.
    • Good example of a public facilities: Camden Yards.
    • Bad: Miami Pro Player Stadium.
• The authors recommend public input in the form of advisory committees and planning workshops, because it will uncover planning errors by providing more eyes on the solution.
• "Contrary to current opinion, it is not un-American to engage in regional planning. American history is replete with examples of such work, the fruits of which we still enjoy today, such as the Appalachian Trail."
• As remote work culture spreads, "those cities which lack a healthy regional organization will gradually lose their most productive residents to places that offer shorter commutes, cleaner air, and easier access to both nature and culture."
• About schools: "many states require unjustifiably oversized building sites, and as a result schools become neighborhood separators rather than community centers." E.g. single story buildings, too much parking.

The traditional neighborhood development checklist (appendix A)

• Local low-density streets should be approximately 20 feet wide with parking on one side.
• A tree strip should be 5-10ft wide with shade trees planted 30 feet apart. "10ft minimum height at planting."
• Residential building setbacks: 1/4 the width of the lot.
• "Parking lots should generally not lead directly into the buildings they serve, but instead deposit pedestrians onto sidewalks."