Oldfangled New Towns

By Kurt Andersen.

For Americans with even a little money, to live anywhere but a suburb is to make a statement. If you are comfortable, you are naturally a suburbanite; living out in the country or in the heart of the city has become a life-style declaration only slightly less exotic than a commitment to vegetarianism or the Latin Mass. In 1950 moving out to some spick-and-span new subdivision was the very heart of the American dream. In 1990 suburban living is simply a middle-class entitlement -- it is how people live.

New census figures show, in fact, that suburbanites will soon be the American majority, up from being about a third of the population back in 1950. Yet as America's cities and villages have dissolved into vast suburban nebulas, no one seems entirely happy with the result. From Riverside County in southern California to Fairfax County in northern Virginia, new American suburbs tend to be disappointments, if not outright failures. Traffic jams are regularly as bad as anything in the fearsome, loathsome city. Waste problems can be worse. Boundaries are ill defined; town centers are nonexistent. Too often, there's no there there.

The critique is not new. Until recently, however, nearly all the dissidents have sneered and carped from on high, dismissing not just the thoughtless, ugly way suburbs have developed, but also the very hopes and dreams of those who would live there. Today, for the first time, the most articulate, ! convincing critics of American suburbia are sympathetic to suburbanites and are proposing a practical cure.

For more than a decade, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, a Miami- based husband-and-wife team of architects and planners, have been reinventing the suburb, and their solution to sprawl is both radical and conservative: they say we must return to first principles, laying out brand- new towns according to old-fashioned fundamentals, with the locations of stores, parks and schools precisely specified from the outset, with streets that invite walking, with stylistic harmony that avoids the extremes of either architectural anarchy or monotony.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are no pie-in-the-sky theorists, but deeply pragmatic crusaders who barnstorm the country, lecturing, evangelizing, designing, bit by bit repairing and redeeming the American landscape. So far the couple and their colleagues have proposed, at the behest of developers, more than 30 new towns ranging from Tannin, a 70-acre hamlet in Alabama, to Nance Canyon, a 3,050-acre, 5,250-unit New Age town near Chico, Calif. Half a dozen such towns are already under construction. Seaside, their widely publicized prototype town in northern Florida, is more than half built. At Kentlands, a new town on the edge of Maryland suburbia outside Washington, the first families have just moved in, and vacant lots are selling despite the housing slump. In addition, the two, among the Prince of Wales' favorite architects, have helped design a town Charles plans to build in Dorset.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are not alone. Sharing roughly the same principles, scores of other architects -- most notably Peter Calthorpe in San Francisco, the partners Alexander Cooper and Jacquelin Robertson in New York City, and William Rawn in Boston -- are designing deeply old-fashioned new towns and city neighborhoods. Most important, developers are buying into the latest view of how suburbs ought to be built. "I still have a memory of the kind of place Duany is talking about," says Joseph Alfandre, 39, the veteran Maryland developer who has already invested millions in Kentlands. "It is the kind of place I grew up in, that I have always dreamed of re-creating. When I was five years old ((in 1956 in Bethesda)), I was independent -- I could walk into town, to the bowling alley, the movie theater, the drugstore. Duany just reminded me of it."

Andres Duany is Mr. Outside to Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk's Ms. Inside. He ^ inspires, he charms, he gives the stirring, witty lectures. She organizes, she teaches, she makes the heartfelt case for a particular scheme. Both are relentless and smart and talented, and both are American baby boomers (he left communist Cuba as a child in 1960; her parents left communist Poland in the late '40s), who met as Princeton undergraduates in the early '70s.

It was in 1980, when Duany and Plater-Zyberk were hired by quixotic developer Robert Davis to turn 80 acres of Gulf Coast scrubland into a resort, that they ceased being merely interesting architects and started becoming visionary urban planners. As with all revolutions, the essential idea was simple: instead of building another dull cluster of instant beach-front high- rises, the developer and designers wondered, why not create a genuine town, with shops and lanes and all the unpretentious grace and serendipitous quirks that have always made American small towns so appealing? Thus was born the town of Seaside -- and with it, the movement to make new housing developments real places again.

Their intent is not to reproduce any particular old-fashioned place. Rather, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have meticulously studied the more-than-skin-deep particulars of traditional towns and cities from Charleston to New Orleans to Georgetown, and of the great prewar suburbs, such as Mariemont, Ohio. They've looked at how streets were laid out, how landmarks were placed, the intermingling of stores and houses, the rough consistency of buildings' cornice lines and materials. They've measured the optimal distances between houses across the street and next door, figured out just what encourages walking (narrow streets, parked cars, meaningful destinations) and reckoned the outer limit of a walkable errand (a quarter mile). They have tried to discern, beyond surface style, exactly what makes deeply charming places deeply charming.

In the standard new suburb, built as quickly as possible by developers working exclusively to maximize short-term profit, little thought is given to making a rich, vital whole. New suburban streets meander arbitrarily, making navigation almost impossible for outsiders. The houses are often needlessly ugly mongrels. Even worse, they are plopped down on lots with almost no regard for how the houses might exist together, as pieces of a larger fabric. They are too far apart to provide the coziness of small-town or city streets, too close to create the splendor of country privacy. Corner stores or neighborhood post offices are almost unheard of.

The single biggest difference between modern suburbs and authentic towns is the dominance of the automobile. Suburban street-design standards have been drafted by traffic engineers, and so the bias is in favor of -- you guessed it -- traffic. It is now a planning axiom that streets exist almost exclusively for cars, and for cars going as fast as possible.

Duany and Plater-Zyberk challenge the urban-planning orthodoxies that, they say, encourage traffic congestion. With dead-end suburban cul-de-sacs leading to "collector roads" that in turn funnel all traffic to the highway, every driver is jammed onto the same crowded road. Why not have shops reached by small neighborhood streets, thus keeping errand runners off the highway? Why not have stores' parking lots connected so shoppers could drive from place to place without heading back out to the main road? Because local codes, drafted by experts, won't permit it.

Thomas Brahms is the executive director of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, the field's main professional association. He is patronizing, even contemptuous, toward the new movement. "It would be nice to turn the clock back to the walking cities of the early 1800s," Brahms says, "but I don't think we can do that. It would be utopian to think that you could draw a circle and think that people would stay within that circle and not leave it."

Duany, Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe and the rest agree that five minutes is as far as most people will generally go for an errand on foot, which means that the natural size for a neighborhood, equipped with the basic shops and services, is 200 acres -- an area a bit larger than one-half mile square. No one is suggesting that people will remain locked within these neighborhoods, only that they should not be required to leave any time they want to shop or work. "These pedestrian neighborhoods create a stronger sense of community," says Calthorpe, who has produced designs for a score of such places, mainly on the West Coast. "They re-create the glue that used to hold together our communities before they were slashed apart by the big expressways."

Calthorpe and the rest share a basic vision, but Duany and Plater-Zyberk have gone further by developing an appealing and practical process for designing new towns efficiently. After a developer hires the firm, the planners start collecting information about the area -- quirks of geography, regional traditions. A sympathetic local architect may be incorporated into the team of designers, planners, renderers and engineers, always led by Duany or Plater-Zyberk. The group descends on the site. About one week and $80,000 to $300,000 later, they will have produced detailed plans and preliminary construction drawings for a new town, complete with a marketing scheme and an artist's slick conceptions of particular streets and possible houses. At each step of the way, citizens and officials are invited to inspect and react to the work-in-progress. "People really see what they're getting," Duany says of this quasi-democracy, instead of being presented with a mystifying fait accompli.

The couple seldom design particular houses or buildings for the towns they plan -- an almost heroic act of restraint for architects. Instead, they conjure a tangible vision of the place they mean to germinate, then draft the rules that architects and builders will follow after they go. The result is towns that are authentic patchworks, not the plainly fake diversity that is inevitable when a single hand creates all the architecture. At Kentlands the existing 19th century masonry farm buildings and 18th century regional architecture helped establish the stylistic parameters, but most Duany-Plater- Zyberk towns in the eastern U.S. carry similar prescriptions: houses must be clad in wood clapboard, cedar shingles, brick or stone, and roofs (of cedar shake, metal or slate) must be gabled or hipped, and pitched at traditional angles.

Kentlands will be the team's first true suburb. An elementary school, its facade partly designed by Duany, opened last fall. Roads are being laid, and impeccable Federal- and Georgian-style houses are under construction by six different builders. All Kentlands' real estate is denominated in 22-ft. chunks -- certain blocks are set aside for 22-ft.-wide town houses, although most lots in town are 44 ft. or 66 ft. wide. Only houses on the largest lots will be freestanding, with various size yards on all four sides. When the town is more or less finished in 1995, there are to be 1,600 houses and apartments, a courthouse, corner shops, a large shopping center and almost 1 million sq. ft. of offices scattered in smallish four- and five-story buildings.

Twenty miles to the southwest, in Virginia, Duany and Plater-Zyberk have designed another new town, Belmont, for the same developer. The first houses are under construction. Wellington, Fla., a village to be appended to a vast, conventional suburb near Palm Beach, is going through the local permit process. The Gate District, four adjacent 100-acre neighborhoods to be built on a decaying, ghostly tract in downtown St. Louis, is what Duany calls "suburban know-how applied to the city."

Duany and Plater-Zyberk are not anti-development. Indeed, businesspeople seem to like them and their notions of enlightened self-interest. Joseph Alfandre, the man behind Kentlands and Belmont, had been a very successful developer of rather routine suburban pods around Washington. In 1988 he was considering land-use plans for the 352-acre Kentlands site. Then he heard about Duany and Plater-Zyberk, became a convert, canceled his plans and started over.

In northern California developer Phil Angelides underwent a similar epiphany. He and some partners had conventionally developed 4,000 acres near Sacramento when, in 1989, Angelides met architect and planner Calthorpe. Now 1,045 acres of the vast development has been redesigned and replanned by Calthorpe as a traditional townlike place called Laguna West. Two double rows of trees will make the streets appear narrower, and the houses will be set unusually close to the sidewalks, 12 1/2 ft. instead of 20 ft. or more -- thus decreasing the usual distance between facing houses and creating outdoor space that feels cozy and communal. (Naturally, traffic engineers at the Sacramento County public works department complained about the density, and about the fact that Angelides and Calthorpe are planting so many trees.) Half the houses at Laguna West will have front porches, and none will be more than half a mile from the town center. Do contemporary Californians really want to live in such a throwback? Although the first model homes will not open until late July, almost half the lots have already been sold to builders.

Any sort of strictly enforced urban planning has come to seem somehow anti- American over the past half-century, and especially during the laissez- faire decade just ended. To create neotraditional towns requires that residents surrender some bits of individualism (no picture windows, no chain- link fences, no raised ranch houses) for the sake of overall harmony -- yet many neighborhood homeowners' associations already have rigid rules regarding lawns and paint colors. Some critics disparage the nostalgia that fuels the traditional-town movement -- as if all suburbs weren't in some measure nostalgic exercises, attempts to indulge middle-class Americans' pastoral urges.

But what worries Duany and Plater-Zyberk most are their pseudo followers, developers and architects who apply a gloss of ye-olde-towne charm without supplying any of the deeper, more fundamental elements of old-fashioned urban coherence. Calthorpe agrees emphatically. "You can have nice streets, and you can put trees back on them, and you can make beautiful buildings with front porches again, but if the only place it leads is out to the expressway, then we are going to have the same environment all over again."

Duany and Plater-Zyberk have devised a practical way to wield influence beyond the projects they can plan and design each year. They have drafted a Traditional Neighborhood Development ordinance that can plug right into the existing system -- and subvert it. The T.N.D. is a boilerplate document that codifies the nuts-and-bolts wisdom Duany and Plater-Zyberk have acquired, which cities, towns and counties can enact. "The T.N.D. thinks of things like corner stores the way other codes think of sewers," Duany explains. "Everybody simply knows you have to have them." More than 200 local planning departments and officials around the country have ordered copies of the ordinance, and the Florida Governor's Task Force on Urban Growth Patterns has cited it as a model code for the whole state.

It seems incredible that such a simple, even obvious premise -- that America's 18th and 19th century towns remain marvelous models for creating new suburbs -- had been neglected for half a century. Yet until Duany and Plater- Zyberk came along, even envisioning a practical alternative to dreary cookie-cutter suburbs had become almost impossible.

During the 1970s everyone came to agree that preserving historic buildings and districts is a good thing. In the 1980s both architectural postmodernism and the Rouse phenomenon -- the transformation of decrepit white elephants into spiffy inner-city shopping centers -- reminded people that old-fashioned buildings and commercial bustle were great pleasures. Today Duany and Plater- Zyberk, Calthorpe and their allies are proposing to go all the way, to build wholly new towns and cities the way our ancestors did. If the 1990s really lives up to its wishful early line -- a return to hearth and home, a redoubled environmental concern, humbler, simpler -- then the new decade should be ripe for the oldfangled new towns to proliferate, to become the American way of growth. Or so, anyway, it is no longer madness to hope.

With reporting by Daniel S. Levy/New York