City Building Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First CenturyJohn Lund Kriken, FAIA, AICP

With Philip Enquist, FAIA, and Richard Rapaport

Princeton Architectural Press, New York

Foreword, Philip Enquist

Preface, John Lund Kriken

Part I: An Introduction to City BuildingThe Millennial CityThe Missing Elements of City DesignA Brief (and Personal) History of Urban Design Theory and PracticeThe Role of Design in Today’s City Building

Part II: Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City BuildingIntroduction

Principle One: Sustainability

Committing to an Environmental Ethic1.1. Creating a Framework for Sustainable Settlement1.2. Choosing the Right Future1.3. Expanding a City/Sustaining Green1.4. Guiding a Nation to a Post-Petroleum Future

Principle Two: Accessibility

Facilitating Ease of Movement2.1. Locating Corridors to Preserve a Downtown2.2. Creating Essential Access to Major Development2.3. Planning for Ferry Transit2.4. Learning from Mistakes: Mixed-Access Streets versus Transit Malls2.5. Unblocking Movement2.6. Restoring Access, Reversing Vacancy and Decline

Principle Three: Diversity

Maintaining Variety and Choice3.1. Bringing Diversity to the Capitol3.2. Designing Diversity into City Expansion3.3. Creating Variety within Uniform Residential Regulations3.4. Identifying the Special Qualities of a Place3.5. Building-in Diversity

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Contents

Principle Four: Open Space

Regenerating Natural Systems to Make Cities Green4.1. Greening the World’s Densest City4.2. Unpaving a River4.3. Topping Off the Burnham Plan with a Green Roof4.4. Developing a Public Greenbelt and Shoreline

Principle Five: Compatibility

Maintaining Harmony and Balance 5.1. Protecting Heritage While Creating Identity5.2. Protecting Heritage While Managing Density5.3. Retaining a Rural Landscape5.4. Reviving Block Patterns and Building Types

Principle Six: Incentives

Renewing Declining Cities/Rebuilding Brownfields6.1. Restoring a River (and Regenerating a City)6.2. Rebuilding Downtowns in a Suburban Context: Good Intentions Get Snagged6.3. Incentivizing a Brownfield

Principle Seven: Adaptability

Facilitating “Wholeness” and Positive Change7.1. Planning for Continuous Change7.2. Guiding and Anticipating Growth with Principles7.3. Recovering a Diamond in the Rust (Belt)7.4. Fitting Inside with Outside7.5. Working toward a Flexible Campus

Principle Eight: Density

Designing Compact Cities with Appropriate Transit8.1. Using Brown, Saving Green: Urban Density for Regional Renewal8.2. Accepting Density and Height 8.3. Taking Advantage of Existing Infrastructure

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Principle Nine: Identity

Creating/Preserving a Unique and Memorable Sense of Place9.1. Developing Identity in Response to Climate9.2. Responding to Climate and Culture9.3. Creating a New Downtown Identity9.4. Harnessing the Potential of the Waterfront

Part III: The City of the Future/The Future of the CityThe City Is the Solution (Not the Problem)A New Urban ModelA Developmental Moore’s LawLearning from AsiaThe Need for a Framework for SettlementRefocusing Planning Theory and PracticeRethinking Single-Purpose Design Education and Problem SolvingA Call for National PlansConclusion

Project Credits

Index

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25An Introduction to City Building

Part II:Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building

27Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building

Introduction

Building successful twenty-first-century cities will require new modes of thought about growth, particularly as it relates to sustainability. This new thinking must be capable of encompassing and even transcending the kinds of technical problem solving explored in Part I. It will not be enough to simply throw around catchphrases like “green buildings,” “sustainable growth,” and “reduced carbon footprint.” Instead, planners and architects need to think in terms of active principles that assist in the ongoing task of designing rich, reward-ing, transit-enabled, high-density cities, taking into account issues of air, water, vegetation, habitat, soil, and other essentials of sustainability.

It is also important to think about innovative city building in relation to historical and geographic factors, even those considered “long ago and far away” but that are nonethe-less important in a city’s present and future life. During Hurricane Katrina, for example, the long-term destruction of barrier wetlands scores of miles downriver from New Orleans played a tragic role in the city’s flooding. In the development of Shanghai’s Chongming Island, for another example, planners recognized the need to preserve agriculture near a large city, even if farming might seem beyond the purview of the best-practice principles of urban design. Like it or not, the reach of the city and hence the requirements for city planning extend far into the regional, and even national, context.

What city builders thus need is a set of overarching principles that provoke thought about larger concerns fundamental to improving and ensuring the quality of urban life. Equally important, designers must preserve and enhance the natural environment that all cities inhabit. These principles are basic to the process of persuasively communicating the need for city stake-holders to think about urban growth in terms of creating livable, sustainable places.

Part II presents nine principles of modern city building and offers projects that exem-plify those principles, or in some cases do not. The principles were applied in a wide variety of planning modalities. They provided insights that helped move projects to consensus and completion. The statement of each principle includes a verb, such as “committing,” “renew-ing,” “maintainting,” or “facilitating,” that suggests the actions that need to be taken. The use of active verbs in the principles is not accidental. Exceptional city building must be an active and ongoing process.

Maps and Plans

Much can be learned from comparing maps and plans for regions, cities, neighborhoods, and individual projects. I illustrate the use of the principles described in Part II in a wide range of case studies, each one introduced within its city or region. Wherever possible, I present the case studies at the same scale, so that the relative sizes of parks, blocks, streets, districts, and neighborhoods can be compared.

28CITY BUILDING

Committing to an Environmental EthicThe Problem: Environmental exploitation and misuse, energy waste, degradation of land, and

pollution of air and water.

Sustainability, the first principle of intelligent twenty-first-century city building, naturally underlies this book’s eight other principles. Broadly speaking, sustainability refers to the con-servation and protection of irreplaceable and nonrenewable natural resources. The subject of sustainability is one of the alpha topics of our time, extensively discussed and written about, if not always comprehensively acted on. The ubiquity of the discussion is enough to suggest that city building in the twenty-first century will be largely governed by the requirement for sustainability. Over the next decades, the city-building profession will need to reckon with a finite supply of energy and with issues of global climate change. These facts mandate a power-ful and ongoing commitment to an environmental ethic in urban design and planning. Two themes need to be addressed in dealing with the development of such an ethic: the natural environment and smart city building.

Principle One: Sustainability

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The Natural Environment

In the new world of sustainable development, planners must begin by considering whether a project will consume irreplaceable lands: prime agricultural land, land that supports ecosys-tems affecting plant and animal life, and land with scenic qualities. Further, developers must carefully evaluate an area for its suitability, avoiding land subject to flooding, wildfires, storms, wind damage, and earthquakes. Water and air are fundamental to supporting population and, above virtually all other resources, need to be protected and conserved.

Protecting the water, air, and other elements of the natural environment is typically addressed through measuring environmental carrying capacity and land-use management.

Environmental Carrying Capacity

It has become a familiar practice for planners to study comparative data on air and water qual-ity and quantity related to population growth and concomitant pollution. This relationship is useful in determining the development capacity within specific air basins and watersheds. It is a relationship that can change for the better over time. Through intelligent environmental stewardship, an area’s capacity to sustain population can increase while protecting desired air and water quality and quantity.

Land-Use Management

To avoid destructive natural hazards and to pro-tect or regenerate irreplaceable lands, including wildlife habitats, animal migration corridors, riverfronts, watersheds, and high-quality agri-cultural lands, planners must consider new land zone designations. These will define where and under what conditions nondestructive urban development may take place and what lands must be protected.

Nine Principles for Twenty-First-Century City Building