Today’s New York Times contains an excellent article detailing the Georgia town of Serenbe. This town is the precursor to a new wave of New Urbanism based on a very old idea: if you want to be able to live sustainably in a place, then you need to be able to eat food from that place. This is the essence of the newfound principle of “food security.” Put another way, you need to be able to look out onto the fields and onto the waters from which most of your food comes... just like our forbearers did. The very first principle of the Original Green is that a sustainable place must be a nourishing place, because if you can’t eat there, you can’t live there.
Marie and Steve Nygren set out to achieve a sustainable, nourishing place in 1991... almost a generation ago. At the time, the thought of building such a place was dismissed by almost everyone. Marie and Steve were exceptionally rare pioneers... and they persisted and built the town.
The problem, of course, is that only a tiny fraction of the world is built by high visionaries such as Marie and Steve. The missing link is something I’ve referred to for years as the “Moral Imperative for Nourishing Places.” Put another way, “How can we tell the story in such a way that an enlightened developer will say ‘It’s in my best interest (including my financial best interest) to build a nourishing place’?” For years, we were not able to put the story together.
There were pieces, to be sure. We have for many years understood the value of a long view... Zimmerman/Volk Associates, the pioneers of forward-looking market studies focused on the New Urbanism, have spoken eloquently, compellingly, and precisely for years about exactly how much more land is worth when you build compactly and preserve open land around the hamlets, villages, and towns. Jackie Benson of MilesBrand, among others, has backed that idea up with specific methodologies. The value of the long view is tightly embedded with the valuing of adjacency to nature, which has been understood as an attribute for centuries.
Local food has more recently become a concern after nearly a century of neglect, pioneered by people such as Alice Waters of Chez Panisse. Today, there are many organizations that champion local food, such as LocalHarvest. Barbara Kingsolver’s account of her family’s attempt to eat locally for a year as chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has achieved almost a cult following.
Other factors helped, too. Land trust tax credits provided incentives for rural landowners to leave their land undeveloped in perpetuity. Similarly, the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) mechanism provided incentives (where they were enacted) for developers to gain density in TNDs and TODs in exchange for purchasing development rights on adjacent farmland, which would forever be left undeveloped.
Nonetheless, these tools alone were not enough to tip the balance. The Seaside Pienza Institute held a pivotal meeting in Pienza, Italia in 2003 that examined urbanism and the agricultural edge. The Institute is fond of addressing problems for which there are not yet solutions, and this was one of the most pressing ones of our age. The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment hosted the Institute a year later; once you get beyond the paparazzi, you’ll find that Prince Charles has for twenty-five years been a strong activist for more sustainable places. Still, the “Moral Imperative” question remained unanswered.
The tipping point came less than a year ago. I was working as a consultant to DPZ on a charrette for Sean Hodgins, the highly enlightened town founder of Southlands near Vancouver. Sean brought in a number of notable consultants, including farmer and author Michael Ableman. We were finally able, due to the design team Sean and Andrés assembled, to put together the long sought Moral Imperative! Granted, Sean really wanted to do the right thing from the very beginning, but I don’t know if I’d put him in the same “true believer” category as Marie and Steve. His family’s background was in more conventional development, although Sean is clearly a “kinder, gentler” version of the breed. Yet, he was able to say at the end of the charrette that “It is clearly in my best interest to build a nourishing place.”
News of this breakthrough spread quickly in the DPZ corner of the New Urbanist world. Two highly notable projects were quickly redesigned based on the things that we had learned, and the story we now could tell. DPZ’s Schooner Bay is now under construction. It has always been conceived as including a working harbour so that it’s a true fishing village, but it will now also include a ring of land around the village will be preserved in perpetuity for farmland that will more than feed the town.
DPZ’s Sky in the Florida panhandle quickly revised its plan to do the same. Conceived from the beginning as a place where buildings would either be off the grid or would sell power back to the grid, the idea of being a nourishing place was a perfect fit.
I work most closely as a consultant with DPZ, but suspect that a similar thing is happening elsewhere within the New Urbanism. Interestingly, I designed a collection of hamlets and villages known as the Waters near Montgomery, Alabama, when I was with PlaceMakers several years ago. In that case, the developer was highly respectful of the beautiful site and wanted to preserve as much of it as possible, so I was able to design it as compact hamlets with 1/4 to 1/2 mile of open land in between so that it had the feel of hamlets in the English countryside. I always conceived of those open fields being farmland someday... that could happen soon. DPZ’s Hampstead has similar aspirations, and their Mount Laurel town near Birmingham had the foresight to include an organic farm nearly a decade ago. Dover-Kohl’s Hudson, also near Montgomery, reportedly accomplishes similar things.
And those are simply the ones I’m most familiar with by association or by proximity... the New Urbanism likely is now seething with nourishing places I don’t know about because the ideal has been so closely nourished for so long amongst the New Urbanists. Check them out...
~ Steve Mouzon
