01 21st Century Planning

Among conventional planning projects, there is an underlying assumption on the urban pattern:  the uses will be neatly segregated into residential, multi-family, commercial, and office space… and the streets will be locals, collectors, and arterials.  This assumption forms a common language  that flows from project design, to project approvals, through to project implementation. Urban projects, however, assume a different pattern.  So how do you counteract this common language when seeking planning approvals for progressive urban projects?

In the process of writing the policy documents for progressive urban projects, it is often necessary to explain the fundamental difference between urbanism and the prevailing pattern of segregated-use, autmobile-focused planning.   Often this explanation seems to find itself as a unique composition,  each time painstakingly reworded to say the same thing.  As the inaugural article to urbanist.ca, this is a position essay written to be a common forward to every policy document aiming at urbanism in the face of a very different assumption.  While it may not fit every situation, the set-up is concise.  Enjoy, and welcome to urbanist.ca.

-GD

The early settlements of North America were infused with the traditional wisdom of centuries of town making.  Built in a time of far less wealth and resource availability, and therefore rooted in the necessity to create places that functioned at the scale of the human being, these settlements today have become some of North America’s most highly valued and loved real estate – often defining the hearts of our towns and cities.

Leading up to the 1930s, the incredible opportunities that the automobile offered and the general modernization of society were merging comfortably with our continued ability to build beautiful towns and cities at the scale of the human being.   But as we emerged out of the Great Depression and the Second World War, we abruptly lowered our standards, trading traditional wisdom for an experimental pattern that strictly separates land into single-use pods, and relegates all development to the scale of the automobile with little or no consideration for human function.

In doing this we traded our vital Main Streets for grey strip malls, the beauty of the tree lined street and the country lane for high-speed thoroughfares, and the diversity of our townscapes for generic subdivisions that consume our rural landscapes.  Having given up on our settlements as human habitat, we have groped to find refuge in the narrow pursuit of parks, pathways, and natural spaces.  The most fortunate have retreated into country residential subdivisions, inadvertently fueling the further destruction of the countryside and the vitality of the town centre.

Fortunately, all of this is changing.  Over the past several decades, growing dissatisfaction with our development practices has led to a clearer understanding their consequences, a rekindling of the traditional knowledge that we lost, and the practical application of this wisdom to modern realities.  After over 60 years, the results of the experimental development patterns that dominated the 20th Century are clear: these practices are not sustainable into the future.  Socially by the lack of meaningful public space and the relegation of our daily lives to vehicle trips; Environmentally by the critical impacts of the automobile and its inefficient use of land and resources; and, Economically by the high cost and low long-term return of automobile-focused development patterns.  But this is a deeply entrenched problem, and in spite of our best intentions, it has proven difficult to change.

Drawing from over two decades of efforts to change the deeply entrenched practices of the past century, the idea of “Sustainable Urbanism” has emerged as a unification of best practices from across many fields and movements.  Sustainable Urbanism is traditional in its grounding in the principles that have always built functional, beautiful human-oriented settlements, but modern in its incorporation of sustainable technologies and contemporary culture.

Encompassing the often confusing array of reform efforts such as Smart Growth, New Urbanism, Low-Impact Development, Livable Communities, and Cluster Subdivision Design, Sustainable Urbanism distills these efforts back down to their base idea: the broad reestablishment of urbanism that creates vital human habitats and fosters a healthy relationship between town and country.  Most importantly, as we again enter an era of resource scarcity, Sustainable Urbanism represents a collective hope that we will once again plan our towns and cities for the long term.  And like our more austere ancestors, that we will aspire to build them as beautifully.