Creating Walkable Places: Compact Mixed-Use Solutions
244
Creating Walkable Places: Compact Mixed-Use Solutions
244Hardcover(New Edition)
-
SHIP THIS ITEMIn stock. Ships in 6-10 days.PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780874209389 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Urban Land Institute |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2006 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 244 |
| Product dimensions: | 8.50(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Creating Walkable Places
Compact Mixed-Use Solutions
By Adrienne Schmitz, Jason Scully
Urban Land Institute
Copyright © 2006 ULI-the Urban Land InstituteAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87420-938-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
"The street is the river of life." — William Whyte
The typical American today leads a sedentary lifestyle — sitting all day at work, taking the elevator instead of the stairs, driving instead of walking, and watching television for recreation. People spend a large part of the day in cars — isolated from others, dealing with road rage, and looking for the best possible parking space at each destination. Although the amount of time people spend exercising as a leisure-time activity has remained constant for years, what has dropped is the amount of exercise that people get from their daily activities — in particular, from walking or biking for transportation.
Today's sedentary habits represent a significant lifestyle change that has occurred since the mid-20th century. The built environment that has emerged over the past half-century is now designed to support inactive lifestyles. Communities and commercial districts are vehicle oriented: they offer an abundance of parking and are accessed via wide, high speed roadways with little accommodation for pedestrians or bikers. Workplaces are isolated in office or industrial parks, so that workers must drive to run errands or to go out to lunch. Stores are separated from neighborhoods and from each other, so that shoppers cannot complete errands on foot, but must instead drive from one store to the next. People are isolated in residential neighborhoods, in which their homes are increasingly likely to offer the amenities and entertainment options that used to be available only in public places.
A growing body of evidence points to connections between physical and mental health and the built environment. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), regular physical activity reduces the incidence of some of the leading causes of death and disability, including heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, colon cancer, and depression. A 2003 report, "The Relationship between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity, and Morbidity," is the first national study to find a clear association between the built environment and activity levels, weight, and health. The report, which analyzed 448 counties across the United States, found that the residents of the most sprawling county in the country weighed an average of six pounds (2.7 kilograms) more than the residents of the most compact county. The study also cites national polls indicating that 55 percent of Americans would like to walk more and that 52 percent would like to bike more. The researchers concluded that many more people would get exercise as part of their daily activities if the environment in which they lived and worked supported a more active way of life. The study suggests a number of solutions:
* Invest in infrastructure that will support bicycles and pedestrians;
* Calm traffic;
* Create safe routes to school;
* Build transit-oriented development;
* Retrofit sprawling communities to make them more pedestrian- and bike-friendly;
* Revitalize walkable neighborhoods;
* Educate and encourage the public.
All of these recommendations can be made part of the tool kit to create places that are more active, more pedestrian friendly, and ultimately more profitable for developers.
The Landscape Today
America is a nation of drivers. On the surface, the nation's reliance on automobiles seems quite fitting for a modern society. But allowing the automobile to shape the environment, and everyone's lives, neglects the civic and social infrastructure that supports community. As architect and author Jan Gehl has said, "Life takes place on foot."
Since the 1950s, widespread automobile ownership has opened larger, less expensive tracts of land to millions of people and made possible the sprawling land development patterns that have emerged, including the suburban model of separated land uses. Today, most residential areas are located miles from the shopping districts, workplaces, schools, and recreational and cultural facilities that support them. Widely dispersed residential developments, many of which lack sidewalks altogether, and massive stretches of retail, with their attendant moonscape of parking lots, make walking or biking more than just difficult; it can be unsafe, unpleasant, and often impossible. As Robert Dunphy, Senior Resident Fellow for Transportation at the Urban Land Institute, has noted, "Currently, conventional greenfield development patterns make transit expensive and underused, render carpooling ineffective, and discourage walking and biking."
Although a growing number of national retail establishments are oriented toward pedestrians, the majority employ designs that favor the automobile. Standard suburban strips and big-box retail centers, in particular, give preeminence to automobile access. Retailers conduct market research by traffic counts and select locations on the basis of highway access and visibility. They require large swaths of visible, convenient parking right out in front. If a sidewalk exists at all, using it is unpleasant and often dangerous — as is traversing the football field of asphalt between the sidewalk and the store. It is equally difficult to walk from one shopping center to an adjacent one because connections are lacking. Shopping centers are often separated by grass swales, untamed wooded areas, fences, loading areas, or other obstacles.
Long commutes rob working people of their free time, but the dispersal of uses hits the oldest and the youngest particularly hard. Children must rely on parents for transportation; few kids can walk down the street to the park for a game of baseball or to the corner store to buy candy. Seniors who can no longer drive are effectively trapped, unable to shop in their neighborhood or to get out and see friends and family without assistance.
Parks, squares, and other open spaces that contribute to the public realm are often either missing from today's commercial districts and residential communities or are inappropriately located or designed. By the mid-20th century, most cities had invested in major park systems, yet their residents were moving to the suburbs, where they believed there were better opportunities for recreation. In fact, the very suburbs to which city dwellers moved had little parkland — and in many of these areas, it was already too late to create major public parks because the best sites were being transformed into residential subdivisions. Moreover, most residents were unwilling to dedicate the funds to pay for public parks. The result is that suburban residential subdivisions — unless they are very large — lack public open space. In many areas where small clusters of development dominate, there are no greenway systems or parks to speak of.
Numerous impediments remain to the development of compact, walkable, mixed-use development; architect and planner Andrés Duany summarizes them as follows:
* Environmental regulations, such as mandatory greenways and buffers, prevent connectivity between projects. Requirements for on-site stormwater retention limit density and discourage infill redevelopment. Lot-coverage limits and high parking requirements also discourage density.
* Most planning and zoning regulations are based on Euclidian single-use zoning, which prohibits mixed-use development. Mandatory setbacks preclude spatial definition and the intimate, pedestrian-scale streetscapes that are created when buildings are set close to streets.
* The public approval process can undermine innovative development; specifically, the public often resists mixed uses, higher density, affordable housing, and connectivity between uses.
* Financing entities tend to favor what has been done in the past. Secondary mortgage markets prefer standard, single-use properties. High parking requirements are typically a precondition of financing.
* Marketing efforts for new communities promote images of idyllic and pastoral living featuring "anti-urban" amenities: gated, single-income enclaves; private civic buildings; and golf courses. Square footage is emphasized over community.
* Traffic engineering often dictates the shape of development, with roadway capacity designed independent of context. The elimination of on-street parking encourages higher traffic speeds and adds to the need for parking lots. Excessively wide rights-of-way preclude the planting of street trees and make it impossible to situate buildings close to the sidewalk. Especially in suburban areas, public transit tends to be viewed as less important than accommodations for private vehicles.
Despite these and other obstacles, the landscape has begun to change. Had this book been written five or ten years ago, conditions would have been described in far more bleak terms. Throughout the country, communities are beginning to reflect the positive changes — in particular, the emphasis on a pedestrian presence — brought about by smart growth and the new urbanism. Downtowns are being rebuilt with a mix of commercial and residential land uses side by side, or stacked one above the other. Some cities have even torn down outmoded and unnecessary highways that ripped through their cores.
Many new towns and villages — beginning with Seaside, Florida, in 1980 — are designed primarily to support pedestrians rather than vehicles. In CityPlace, in West Palm Beach, Florida, local government and private developers worked together to create a strong, pedestrian-oriented downtown where none had existed. In 1990, Reston Town Center, in Northern Virginia, was developed as the walkable downtown core for a vehicle-oriented suburban community originally developed in the 1960s.
Steiner + Associates, based in Columbus, Ohio, has built its reputation on pedestrian-oriented retail development. According to Yaromir Steiner, president of the firm, today's town centers are becoming places that
* Serve as hubs of social, civic, and commercial activity, with public spaces as focal points;
* Have a more balanced, integrated mix (based on local market needs) of residential, hospitality, and office space;
* Include a flexible, versatile design that will outlast initial building uses;
* More successfully balance the need to be pedestrian-friendly with the need to accommodate cars.
Walkable places are nothing new, nor are they obsolete. Major American cities like Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., have always been defined by their pedestrian focus and have remained viable and strongly competitive centers of business and culture. Smaller towns and cities — from Asheville, North Carolina, to Boulder, Colorado — have remained desirable places to live and work largely because of their pedestrian focus. Many college towns are prime examples of viable, pedestrian-oriented communities. In fact, part of what makes the college years so memorable for so many people is the way of life afforded by these intimate, pedestrian-scale communities and campuses. Some developers of master-planned communities are even beginning to look to college campuses as models for their projects.
Less Active Lifestyles
According to the surgeon general of the United States, 60 percent of Americans do not engage in physical activity on a regular basis, and 25 percent do not engage in any physical activity at all. When asked why they don't exercise more, many people cite time constraints. For this reason, researchers believe that integrating exercise into people's daily routines — in the form of walking or biking to a destination — is the best way for more people to get the exercise they need. And because so many people live and work where walking and biking are not even possible, creating more pedestrian-friendly environments is critical to that goal.
More than one-quarter of all trips made by households are of one mile (1.6 kilometers) or less. Of those, 75 percent are made by car. Of all trips of one to two miles (1.6 to 3.2 kilometers), 89 percent are made by car. Because much of the built environment developed in the past 50 years has been designed for cars instead of people, it is no surprise that walking has taken a back seat to driving. Creating places that are easy and enjoyable to reach on foot or by bicycle could cut out many of the short trips that people now make by car, but until pedestrian-friendly development becomes more common, the only rational choice for most people is to drive everywhere — even for short distances.
As both homes and workplaces have sprawled away from cities and towns, walking has dramatically declined as a mode of transportation. In 1960, 9.9 percent of workers walked to work. By 1990, the percentage had fallen to 3.9 percent; and by 2000, only 2.9 percent of workers arrived on foot. It is worth noting, however, that in the more compact places, one-third more people walk to work than in the most sprawling places.
Children are also walking less. In 1969, 48 percent of students (age five to 15) walked or biked to school. In 2001, fewer than 15 percent of students walked to school, and 1 percent biked. Why the decline? Parents cite excessive distances, a poor walking environment, and concerns about safety. The consolidation of neighborhood schools — which requires larger sites — is largely responsible for the greater distances that students must travel.
The Current Health Crisis
Decades of vehicle-oriented development, coupled with poor health and nutrition habits, have resulted in a dramatic rise in the portion of the population that is overweight or obese. Between 1991 and 2001, the prevalence of obesity in the American population grew from 12 to 21 percent — a 75 percent increase — and the rate is continuing to climb. Obesity is linked to a number of serious health problems, most notably diabetes and heart disease. According to the American Diabetes Association, more than 18 million people — over 6.3 percent of the population — have been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, now the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. Previously, this form of diabetes was known as "adult-onset diabetes" because it had historically been diagnosed only in middle-aged adults. However, the name was changed when doctors noted a rapid increase in the disease among younger people — even children.
According to the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization, the increase in obesity has also people. A RAND study shows that from 1984 to 1996, among those age 30 to 39, the rate of disability increased from 118 per 10,000 to 182 per 10,000, a 54 percent increase. During the same period, among those from 40 to 49 years of age, the rate increased from 212 to 278 per 10,000, a 31 percent increase. "Obesity is the only trend that is commensurate in size with what we found happening with disability," notes Darius Lakdawalla, lead author of the RAND report. Further, RAND researchers believe that about 60 percent of the increase in obesity rates is attributable to sedentary behavior, and 40 percent to poor dietary choices.
Lack of exercise and the isolation created by vehicle-oriented environments also affect mental health. The prevalence of clinical depression has increased significantly in recent years. In Bowling Alone, author Robert Putnam notes that depression is ten times more common in the current generation than it was in the last. Putnam also notes that social interaction has health benefits. According to his research, the risk of dying during a one-year period doubles if a person is not a member of any group in which social connections can be made. Similarly, one of the main points of Ray Oldenburg's The Great Good Place is that people who are isolated tend to be less happy and less healthy.
Sedentary behavior and the resulting weight increases take a large toll on the American public in terms of monetary costs, quality of life, and premature death. Daily physical activity can help control weight; reduce the risk of heart disease; manage high blood pressure and high cholesterol; and help prevent osteoporosis, back pain, and even colds and infections. In addition, mental health conditions such as depression, stress, and insomnia can be reduced or prevented through regular exercise.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Creating Walkable Places by Adrienne Schmitz, Jason Scully. Copyright © 2006 ULI-the Urban Land Institute. Excerpted by permission of Urban Land Institute.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.