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We have been looking at ways to use Traditional City design techniques to
make fabulous Places for people -- as fabulous as the great cities of Europe
and Asia, which remain today treasures of civilization.
April 1,
2012: How To Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 7: Let's Bulldoze
a Big Box Shopping Center
August
21, 2011: How To Make A Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 6: Better
Than a Thousand Words
July
31, 2011: How To Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 5: The New
New Suburbanism
July 17,
2011: How To Make A Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 4: More SFDR/SFAR
Solutions
June 12,
2011: How to Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City 3: Single Family
Detached in the Traditional City Style
May 15,
2011: How To Make A Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 2: A Ski Resort
Village
August
22, 2010: How to Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City
October
10, 2009: Place and Non-Place
This is not too hard when you have a subway and train system which is
sufficiently developed that a person can live comfortably without a car --
when, in fact, a car becomes a burdensome luxury item. This is the normal
state of affairs in most large cities in Europe and Asia, but in the United States,
I would say only New York City fills the bill, and then only if you stay
inside New York itself. The problem with New York is, of course, that you
have to live in New York, which even New Yorkers will admit is pretty rough
going for the average family. This is because New York is a 19th Century
Hypertrophic City, not a Traditional City. But, you can still live there
without a car. Just take the subway.
January
31, 2010: Let's Take a Trip to New York 2: The Bad and the Ugly
January
24, 2010: Let's Take a Trip to New York City
February
21, 2010: Toledo, Spain or Toledo, Ohio?
Ideally, you can have not only a nice train system within the city itself,
but one that stretches all over the country, so you can travel anywhere
without ever needing a car. This might seem utopian, but it is the normal
state of affairs if you live in Paris or Osaka.
December
27, 2009: What a Real Train System Looks Like
Alas, for us here in the U.S., we can't just wait around until someone builds
a nationwide train system. We have to accept that, for at least a while,
personal automobiles will be the only means available for transportation, at
least when traveling out of a localized area, which may be built in the
Traditional City fashion and thus where a person can do their business by
walking instead of driving. In other words, everyone will have to own a car,
and have a place to park it. Our goal for now is to make that car something
that is used only occasionally, and that you can do a lot more by walking
around your neighborhood, to the school, bank, grocery store, post office and
so forth. You can commute to work either on foot or perhaps a train if that
is available. So, you are using your car a lot less, even though you still have
one. And, maybe the family can avoid that second or third car.
We have already seen that we can create rather lovely Traditional City-type
neighborhoods, and population densities on the order of 30,000 people per
square mile (compared to about 8,000 people for the denser examples of
Suburban Hell today), while maintaining the "single family detached
residential" or SFDR format popular today. Indeed, this is quite common
in Japan, which has a long history of SFDR housing dating back centuries.
This high-density SFDR format can easily accomodate parking for one or two
cars per household.
July 31,
2011: How To Make a Pile of Dough With the Traditional City 5: The New New
Suburbanism
SFDR neighborhood in Seijo, western Tokyo. Note the people walking down the
middle of the street.
However, we begin to run into troubles when we want to raise the density
further, for example to a typical attached townhouse format. If you have a
garage for every townhouse, and a plot width of perhaps 25 feet, pretty soon
you run into the "wall of garage doors" effect: the entire first
floor is dominated by automobile parking. This is unfortunate, because we
want to make a place that is pleasant for people to walk, and the people are
walking there at ground level.
Townhouses in Tokyo, with parking at the first level. Still a pleasant
environment, but parking dominates the street view.
This can be tolerable,
although less than ideal. By the time we get to a higher density format, like
an apartment building, we have to provide more parking somehow. Ideally we
can avoid the outdoor parking lot, as this is terribly ugly, and obviously
contrary to our goal of higher density that motivated us to make an apartment
building in the first place.
In the case of the apartment building, and also the townhouse to large
degree, I think the way forward lies with some form of decked shared parking.
"Shared" means that there is one large parking garage, not a
separate garage with a separate entrance for each resident.
"Decked" means that the parking area has a concrete ceiling, and on
top of the parking garage, you can have some sort of pleasant and useful
space, perhaps a building, courtyard, garden, patio, or some other lovely
element of the Traditional City.
On the street level, you would see just one entrance/exit, although there
might be parking for hundreds of cars inside. This eliminates any need for a
"wall of garage doors." In terms of land use, we have no
"Non-Place" because the parking areas are all decked, and above the
parking, we have some sort of Traditional City Place.
October
10, 2009: Place and Non-Place
We want the street level view to be some sort of Place. The street level is
the ideal spot for some sort of retail establishment. You could also have
some sort of inviting and attractive exterior of a house or office building.
What we absolutely don't want is a blank wall -- that is no better than the
wall of garage doors that we are trying to avoid.
Apparently, this sort of thing has already become common for townhouses in
Canada, and for larger buildings in Texas (of all places). Here's my drawing
of how you could use this idea to create an apartment building which is very
much like the courtyarded apartment buildings of central Paris, but which
includes ample parking for all residents, and also retail at street level:
One side of the building can
be adjacent to an "arterial street" which has a dedicated
automobile roadway and sidewalks. The other three sides can be Really Narrow
Streets, i.e. pedestrian streets of 15-25 feet wide. The height of the
building is six stories, a common Traditional City height throughout Europe.
If you replace the six floors of apartments with three-story townhouses, then
all the townhouses can have a nice backyard like Julianne Moore, and not have
the front of the townhouse dominated by a two-car garage door.
March
20, 2011: Let's Take a Trip to Julianne Moore's House
In this way, we can accommodate quite a lot of parking, while keeping a form
that is quite close to our Traditional City ideal, and also maintaining our
goal of eliminating as much Non-Place as possible.
Also, we can not only provide parking for residents, we can provide parking
for visitors and residents of other buildings. The buildings adjacent to
arterial streets, with dedicated automobile roadways, can have lots of
parking, while the buildings nearby might have no parking at all. Thus, we
can create a neighborhood in the true Traditional City manner, with no
parking whatsoever, a true pedestrian-centric Place, but still have ample
parking within a brief walk. Indeed, no cars would want to go there, because
there is no place to park!
All the parking you want and ... a neighborhood that looks
like this!
Paris.
No autos here, but you can have a building nearby with shared decked parking.
Freiburg, Germany.
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