Railroad Suburbia 2.0

A lot of the New Urbanist corpus--particularly the town planning elements--focuses on the traditional town planning model. Their ultimate desire is to build communities like these:

Now the thing is the communities the New Urbanists have built

have tended to look a lot like

each of which happens to be a railroad suburb.

Railroad suburbs were primarily developed during the Victorian era, fin-de-siècle, and into the 1920s. Aping developers' success in using streetcar lines to sell new housing, several railroads decided to enter the development game themselves and build "New Towns" lineside. This pattern--small, semi-dispersed centers of population highly centralized around train stations (a major railroad suburb giveaway is when a train station lies at one end of Main Street) became a primary mode of outward urban expansion for the better part of a century, and has left us a rich heritage of the nicest, leafiest communities in cities all across the nation. And, despite catastrophic disinvestment in anything that wasn't a house farm from the 1950s to the early 2000s, railroad suburbs continued to be the effective archetype of quality American community.

(And sometimes they became something more.)

New Urbanism got its start replicating railroad suburbs as new towns--even if the original railroad discontinued passenger service, the railroad suburb is, for all intents and purposes, a new town. Duany and Plater-Zyberk folded in some Southern Baroque town planning tradition, and--voilà!--an alternative to house farms, Levittown tracts, and meandering anti-grids was born.

There are profound implications to this. First, one of the great successes of the movement is the re-creation of the railroad suburb. Transit-Oriented Development, an idea about as old as New Urbanism, is (in essence) a manner of development built on the workings of a railroad suburb.

In the eventuality transportation policy changes--as it must, if Italy is at the vanguard of the trend--we have reclaimed the development model associated with a smaller, smarter, more compact type of urbanism and town-building.

The key becomes, then, developing the right transportation policy: Most cities have enormous wealths of historical (largely disused) potential commuter rail lines--lines on which, were they active, we can hang New Urbanist (re)developments and intensification...These should be the avenues of growth in metros.

An Emergent Main Street?

Something interesting is happening in the village of Lafayette Hill. A Main Street is coming to be.

This, despite the majority of this Main Street consists of mid-century strip malls and commercial pads. It's a Main Street in use, though decidedly not form. Take a look.

It runs like this from Joshua Road to Church Lane.

But, since the buildings are aging, the majority of chains have moved out, to newer, shinier digs around the Plymouth Meeting Mall. In their place are more locally-owned stores, more boutiques, more inns, and what are generally considered the two best Persian cuisine joints in the region.

Lafayette Hill is the overgrown agglomeration of two older villages: Barren Hill and Marble Hall, which has led to its bipolar development and a small gap in the middle. But the density, the connectivity, the ingredients are all there--and, as the buildings age and rents come down, the more interesting uses, too.

Which leads to the greatest problem in front of Lafayette Hill: its very autocentrism. Strip malls don't create a pedestrian atmosphere, and despite the fact that it's the same size as e.g. Lansdale, walking rates are much, much lower. So what's to be done?

Brand it. Give it a "Main Street Lafayette Hill" identity; play upon its existing strengths. Have a citizens' day; take over a parking lot and use it for a farmer's market; install sidewalks all the way up and down. Make de jure the de facto parallel parking already in front of the Wawa and extend it all the way up and down Germantown.

And in the long term, change the zoning code to remove setbacks and favor rear parking*. Curb minimums, and encourage walking plans for the bars. Preserve the Manayunk vernacular and Victorian buildings already here, of which there are a few. And allow structures to grow to 3-5 stories.
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* Transit access is relatively poor, unlike Conshy or Paoli or Lansdale.

Suburban, Exurban, New Urban South Philadelphia

Note: This post originally appeared Friday.

The deepest part of South Philadelphia, south of the Schuylkill Expressway, is full of surprises. An Olmsted park graces the corner of Broad and Pattison–as does the NovaCare Center. The most most of us ever see of this area is the Sports Complex, or, if we work there, the Navy Yard.

But behind the Navy Yard lies a swath of (mostly) post-war residential development that reflects the changing perception of ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

The Architecture of Wissahickon: Urban, Suburban, Midcentury, Victorian

The controversial Roxborough development proposal that caused quite a stir last week is at the edge of one of the city’s more remarkable neighborhoods. Staunchly middle-class, this neighborhood hangs tenaciously onto the slope between Ridge Avenue and the beginning of the Wissahickon Gorge, like a mining town halfway up a mountain.

It is also remarkable in that it has been continuously developed and filled out over the last century and a half, with a housing mix ranging all the way ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Basics: Landscape Urbanism?

New Urbanism's grand don, Andrés Duany, and Landscape Urbanism's nascent patriarch, Charles Waldheim, debated at CNU 19  this past week. While readers of this blog will note that I tend to fall somewhere between New Urbanism and another nascent challenger (Old Urbanism), I have said in the past that Landscape Urbanism is most ideally suited to park design, and landscape design techniques have become substantially more sophisticated* since Landscape Urbanism's spiritual forefather Olmsted's day.

But what about habitable space? Landscape Urbanism would, I think, hold Radburn, NJ, up as the exemplar, the community to be emulated.

Radburn, NJ. Credit: The Urbanerds

Radburn is actually not Landscape Urbanist at all but was rather built under the theory and ideals of the Garden City. The Garden City ideal actually comes from the late Victorian period, and stressed escape from the dingy, filthy, dark, polluted cities of the Industrial Age. Garden Cities were, above all else, self-sufficient, and was the first major example of urban planning executed on sociological principles rather than the aesthetic ones which had defined Baroque and City Beautiful planning. Radburn, as a Garden City, was designed and executed such that the primary entrances opened into a series of pedestrian malls or pseudo-parks, while services (of the automotive kind) were located at the back of the houses--along the street. Since the yard space, become amentized, was later privatized, Radburn is a unique historical look at how the postwar suburb developed...every suburb, somewhere in its heart, wants to look like Radburn, but without the uniquely strong and careful planning that went into it, no suburb can ever be Radburn**.

Just the same with Landscape Urbanism. Waldheim denies that he's defending the suburbs, but if one looks at their loftiest living-space ideals, and the history of those ideals, there can be no doubt that a Landscape Urbanist mentality will lead us right back into traditional suburbia. Waldheim may be a new Ebenezer Howard, and James Corner Frederick Law Olmsted, but it was the catch-22 Mumford noted: without careful planning, landscape planning devolves into something else, something much worse.

This isn't to say that Radburn is a bad sort of place--but with the resources needed to get Radburn right, a certain rarity value is needed--and with that rarity value, expense. The lowest common denominator of the Levittowns and their progeny is unsustainable. A handful of Radburns can be--but that's the key--a handful. There are not enough resources available in this country, or even on this earth, to sustainably house the United States' population in a way befitting Landscape Urbanism's Radburn ambitions; to do it quickly would involve a coarsening of design that would be indistinguishable from Levittown and benefit no one.
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* Pretty as Central Park, Prospect Park, the Emerald Necklace, and other assorted Olmsted parks are, they are extremely unsophisticated in light of today's landscape design techniques. They discount the natural "lay of the land" in their settings and are instead highly engineered green sculptures. Indeed, the weaving of ecology in has been one of landscape design's most stunning successes over the past century.
** Also, Radburn is a rail-oriented design. The town focus is the train station, and the main retail strip is centered on it.