the Original Green

   My tweet-cast of Léon Krier's address to the Congress for the New Urbanism Saturday morning created a small firestorm for a while on Twitter characterized by @nlamontagne's "Low-rise fetishism is bad for cities" and @BLAH_CITY's iconic "...my coffin will be "human scale"! All else is architecture..." Never mind that the real fetish here is the Skyscraper Fetish. In any case, here are several thoughts for the skyscraper apologists:

   Sustainability may be defined as "keeping things going in a healthy way, long into an uncertain future." That uncertain future is very unlikely to include cheap energy at levels we know today. At unaffordable energy price levels, what fails to work in high rises?

   1. Wind speed increases with distance from the ground. A gentle breeze on the ground translates to something closer to a gale higher up. Open two windows for cross-ventilation on the forty-second floor, and all your papers may get blown out into the street. That increased wind speed, when combined with rain, plays havoc with weatherstripping in operable windows. Operable windows in high-rise offices therefore have serious issues. But on a hot day without cheap fossil fuel, inoperable curtain walls have an even bigger problem: without the ability to cross-ventilate, the building may literally be uninhabitable because without a way to dump excess heat, interior temperatures would soon become even hotter than outdoors.

   2. Our great-grandchildren will ask "what were they thinking?" about many of our building techniques. Chief amongst them will be glass curtain walls. The best possible curtain wall today is not as good an insulator as a 2x4 wood stud wall, R-11 fiberglass batts, and the cheapest possible finishes. Yet we wrap all four sides of buildings (including east and west sides, facing the hot, low sun) with the stuff, acting as if the laws of thermodynamics don't exist. But as energy costs climb towards the unaffordable, glass-clad high-rises will move closer towards being uninhabitable.

   3. We sun-screen our curtain walls to a high percentage because if you're sitting near the curtain wall, the glare through clear glass would be far too strong to work comfortably. But the sun-screening cuts down on the light that's able to reach deeper into the space, so only those workstations right on the window have good daylighting. Interestingly, the screening percentage often allows close to the amount of light you would get if you put traditional windows in the wall because they only occupy 15-25% of the wall.

   4. In most moderate climates, passively-conditioned buildings benefit from exterior walls with thermal mass, a property almost completely missing from glass curtain walls. Unfortunately, high-rise buildings cannot be retrofit with massive walls because the building structure would not support the many tons of additional weight. This, combined with the issues above, mean that glass-clad buildings that cannot be retrofit will be uninhabitable in a period of unaffordable energy costs.

   5. The towers of large buildings built before air conditioning were shaped like letters so that no wing was more than 30 to 40 feet wide. They daylit beautifully. With transoms over doors to the hallway, they cross-ventilated nicely as well. Most high-rises have floor plates far in excess of 40 feet in their narrowest dimension, meaning that only the corner offices cross-ventilate and only the outer offices daylight. The bulk of the floorplate would be uninhabitable in a period of unaffordable energy costs.

   6. Elevator motors consume more energy than any other single piece of equipment in a high-rise building. In a period of unaffordable energy costs, people would only be able to occupy floors as high as they could physically climb. For most people, that limit is a climb of 4 or maybe 5 flights of stairs, resulting in a city that looks much more like historic London, Paris, or Rome than Manhattan or Vancouver.

   ~Steve Mouzon

   Many New Urbanist places have for years sat more lightly on the land than most conventional developments. Several xeriscaping principles date all the way back to the beginning of Seaside, which was designed by DPZ and launched the entire New Urbanism movement. But Robert Davis, Town Founder of Seaside, didn’t mandate native species primarily for high-minded ideals, but rather to save the cost of an irrigation system.

   This tradition has continued to this day in the work of many New Urbanists. For example, the Waters was re-planned after having originally been designed by others in a sprawling pattern. The original plan called for bulldozing a hill at the south end of what we redesigned as the Lucas Point hamlet. I told the Town Founder “let me save you the money of moving all that dirt; we’ll leave the hill, put a chapel on top, and line a street up with it to let the chapel terminate the vista.” Today, Chapel Hill is the most memorable view at the Waters, but the rationale for doing it that way was purely economic.

   Schooner Bay, a new DPZ-designed town rising now on the eastern shore of Abaco in the Bahamas, probably illustrates Original Green principles more clearly and broadly than any other place built in our time. The Original Green is the sustainability that existed before the Thermostat Age, which also happens to be the era during which we developed really big bulldozers, dump trucks, and the like, allowing crushing environmental impacts that simply weren’t feasible before.

   Orjan Lindroth, Town Founder of Schooner Bay, isn’t simply doing the right thing. Instead, he has also analyzed the cost savings of many of these low-impact measures. He calls it the Ecological Dividend. Conventional development is driven by two things: asset inflation and bank liquidity. Because of this, these developments are primarily marketing exercises, designed to create as much sales velocity as possible. The components of the Ecological Dividend don’t show up anywhere on a standard project pro-forma, but they can be immense, as we’ll see. Let’s examine the astounding Ecological Dividend that is accruing at Schooner Bay, keeping in mind that the same can be done elsewhere as well; it’s not specific to Schooner Bay.

Time

   Many components of the Ecological Dividend would not be possible in a high-velocity development bent on building out in 2-3 years. High-speed development is almost always high-debt development as well. Development driven foremost by the ticking interest clock forces decisions not in the best interest of the place. Orjan has chosen not to burden Schooner Bay with debt that requires a schedule dictated by cash flow. The market, rather than the debt, determines the pace of development. This is the way that most of the Most-Loved Places were built.

   Ultimately this is far more beneficial to both developer and the community. Homebuyers are not paying significant bank finance and interest costs in their land prices. These items can amount to 30% of the cost of a new development and these benefits are passed on directly to homeowners.

Diversity

   Schooner Bay has, from the beginning, opened its doors to a diverse population of primarily Bahamians as well as foreigners across wide socio-economic strata. Because of this, it will not be subject to the generational risk faced by all single-purpose developments such as gated golf course subdivisions. Instead, the broad demographics of Schooner Bay will more closely mirror those of the Most-Loved Places of the Bahamas such as Harbour Island, Hope Town, and Man-of-War Cay. Building in this way should allow Schooner Bay to join that list of Most-Loved Places someday.

Landscaping

   One clear beneficiary of this expanded timespan is the cost of landscaping. Schooner Bay runs an onsite nursery which provides all plant material for the town. Orjan plants heavily to create a subtropical paradise, but because the 200,000 trees he expects to plant will all be grown from seedlings in the nursery over several years rather than bought at a mature size from elsewhere, the savings should be approximately $38.8 million ($6/tree to propagate and grow vs. $200/tree to buy large.)

Earthwork

   From the very beginning of Schooner Bay’s design, earthwork was always conceived as having multiple purposes. Every bucket of dirt that needed to be moved was slated to be used where it could create an asset. Not one load of dirt or sand has ever or will ever leave or enter Schooner Bay from elsewhere. Grading in a balanced way doesn’t just save on dump charges or borrow fees; it also saves large quantities of fuel necessary to haul the material back and forth. But the beginning of earthwork savings occurs when you decide to leave a lot of the material where it is already, like we did with Chapel Hill at the Waters. Conventional developments often mass-grade the site at the beginning for stormwater convenience and ease of construction. This also destroys all trees and other vegetation, eliminating all wildlife habitat as well. Savings on earthwork alone at Schooner Bay (existing plant material is counted below) should be about $24.4 million over conventional practices.

Forest

   38 acres of forest are being preserved at Schooner Bay. A narrow band through the center of the forest is a parrot migration route preserved in DPZ’s original plan. But once sitework surveying began and Orjan saw the beauty of the coppice, he asked DPZ to dramatically expand the preserved area. Galina Tachieva, DPZ's Project Director and author of the Sprawl Repair Manual, marveled that a Town Founder would preserve so much green space because typical developers want to cram every available sliver of land with as many lots as they can sell. Planting a coppice like this one would cost at least $1 million/acre; preserving the whole thing cost only $200,000, for a net Ecological Dividend of $37.8 million.

Dune

   Years ago, when Seaside went through its first major hurricane, it came out virtually unscathed, while there was major devastation for miles on either side. Hurricane experts from all over flocked to Seaside, and for several months afterwards, news reports referred to it as the Seaside Miracle. Analysis eventually showed that while Seaside’s higher structural standards helped, the biggest single factor was the decision to build behind the dune instead of on the dune. Orjan took this to heart, planting the first dune with thousands of native dune plants so their collective root systems will reinforce it. He then built a second dune a few dozen yards behind it, further strengthening the shoreline and providing a platform for houses just behind the second dune. The second dune turned lower-value lots with no view into oceanfront lots by elevating them, and was built using the sand spoil from the harbour excavation. It turns out that because the dune adjoins the harbour, the second dune’s location was actually the closest place the sand spoil could have been used, reducing hauling to a minimum. Building a dune in conventional fashion by hauling sand onto the site would have cost about $7.5 million, but using harbour spoils costs only $200,000, for a dividend of $7.3 million.

   Interestingly, the eye of Hurricane Irene crossed over Schooner Bay at her strongest point in the fall of 2011, with winds of 125-130 miles per hour. Yet in spite of the fact that most building components (even the windows) are built on-site, not a single pane of glass was broken! Here's the full story of the Schooner Bay Miracle.

Harbour

   The Harbour at Schooner Bay was the source of many feet of topsoil that had eroded over the centuries from the higher rocky land to the hollow that became the harbour. Returning the topsoil to the higher land made it more valuable, especially because Schooner Bay is doing so many things to become a Nourishable Place. Building that much topsoil for gardens would take each homeowner several years of work. The harbour itself contributes food as well, as it will be home to a small fishing fleet, making Schooner Bay an authentic fishing village. It should be noted that the natural whale-tail shape of the shoreline at this point shelters the harbour to an unusual degree, making Schooner Bay the best site for a harbour for many miles around. The dividend created by all the benefits of the harbour is estimated at $20 million.

Community Cistern

   Normally, water is stored in steel tanks with pressure equipment, all of which is subject to corrosion and normal wear and tear. Orjan took an alternative route, building a 2-acre sand tank on the ridge 60 feet above the town center and allowing the water to gravity-flow to its destinations. Net savings are $2 million, plus all the avoided maintenance in the future. Also, material excavated to create the cistern was used to make building pads. As elsewhere, everything on the site has at least a double use, in good Cradle-to-Cradle fashion.

Eco Machine

   Sewer treatment in a remote location is usually expensive, as you have to create your own sewer treatment plant. Normally, these are large, smelly, undesirable things as well. The Eco Machine lets nature do the job instead, digesting sewage below ground level in what appears to be nothing more than a long swale or rain garden planted with a variety of plants designed for each step of the digestion process. The Eco Machine trades odor for beauty, and saves $2.5 million.

Smaller & Smarter Homes

   Schooner Bay champions the idea of building smaller and smarter as well as any place being built today. They are literally satisfying the same customers in half the space they might otherwise have built. So while other oceanfront developments in the Bahamas might average $800,000 in construction cost per house, Schooner Bay is doing enough clever things that they are averaging only $400,000 per house... and those houses are extremely well-built. At 500 homes, that’s a staggering $200,000,000 difference in construction cost.

   But as stunning as this is, it’s only half the story. The other half is the fact that Schooner Bay will have a completely unheard-of range of 40 to 1 from most expensive to least expensive homes... or from around $4 million to just under $100,000. In short, it will feel like other great Bahamian towns like Dunmore Town, full of a complete range of Bahamian culture, rather than terminally boring subdivisions where everyone is wealthy. And yes, at this price range, most of the residents will be Bahamians instead of foreigners.

Living Traditions

   Orjan and a group of fellow Bahamians commissioned A Living Tradition [Architecture of the Bahamas] several years ago; the book has since won a CNU Charter Award. The title isn’t marketing fluff; rather, it makes note of the core aspiration of the book: to start a new living tradition of Bahamian architecture based on patterns that make the most sense for regional conditions, climate, and culture. I have tested many ideas over the years meant to contribute to restarting living traditions, and what I have found is that without a living tradition, builders will price standard suburban sprawl details as “standard price,” whereas better details that make more sense and even use less labor and materials get “custom pricing.” But once a tradition begins to spring to life in the builder community, the equation inverts: when they now know why they’re doing the better details, those better details get “standard pricing” and the bad details they don’t want to do anymore get “custom pricing.” It’s not yet clear what the savings will be from the traditions beginning to live at Schooner Bay, but it will doubtlessly be somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars.

Capital Cost Dividend

   Just in case you’re not keeping track, the total Ecological Dividend of building the Original Green way totals $332.8 million. And that doesn’t even consider the other benefits of time, nor the value of living traditions. But there are operating cost savings as well:

Electricity & Geothermal Cooling

   Building smaller and smarter creates several dividends beyond the initial construction cost. Smaller houses daylight better and also cross-ventilate better because each room is likely to have more exterior walls. This reduces both cooling loads and lighting loads, and a reduced lighting load reduces the need for cooling even further. So you’re not only lighting and cooling less space, but you’re also doing it more efficiently... which is a really good thing, because electricity is expensive in the Bahamas.

   Schooner Bay cools geothermally, which will save up to 50% versus standard heat pumps. The savings below are calculated assuming everyone shuts the houses up and runs the heat pumps all the time. But geothermal cooling has a huge hidden benefit: because the units dump heat into water rather than into air, you don’t need condenser units sitting just outside, buzzing and blowing hot air most of the time. A courtyard with a couple condenser units is uninhabitable when they’re running because they’re so annoying, and they’re blowing hot air on you if you’re sitting nearby. But a quiet (and cooler) courtyard entices you outdoors, where you get acclimated to the Bahamas’ balmy climate, and therefore need less air conditioning when you return indoors.

   You might actually find that you need air conditioning only on the hottest days, and if so, you’ll discover that there is no equipment so efficient as a machine that is off. Discover this, and you’ll find a way of saving far more than the 50% savings over standard heat pumps, while enjoying your outdoor rooms much more than you otherwise would. Total electricity savings for cooling and everything else should be about $2 million per year on the roughly 500 houses that will populate Schooner Bay at full build-out.

Water Supply & Reuse

   Water supply is very expensive in the Bahamas as well, and more subject to inflation than most commodities as fresh water is quite limited. Schooner Bay captures rainwater and treats it rather than buying it from elsewhere. Homes and other buildings at Schooner Bay reuse greywater for flushing toilets and irrigating gardens, reducing the need for treated water by about half. The water supply and reuse dividend should be about $2.5 million per year.

Waste Water Treatment

   When you reuse water, and use less water to begin with, you don’t have to treat as much waste water. The wastewater treatment dividend is estimated to be $1.44 million per year.

Food

   Schooner Bay will not only be a true fishing village, but will be ringed by acres of organic gardens on the landward side. Farmed in a bio-intensive manner, it may be possible to feed the entire town with food raised in the gardens and fished from the sea. There are many benefits to local organic food, including the facts that it is both healthier and tastier, that it doesn’t require countless gallons of oil to transport from faraway fields in foreign lands, and that you know your farmer. Yes, that’s correct... it’s likely that the farmer will provide housing for the farm workers at Schooner Bay or immediately adjacent. But how do you put a value on that? Would eating that way be worth a difference of a dollar a meal to you? If so, then that’s a food dividend of $1.5 million per year.

Transportation & the Local Economy

   Orjan is working harder than any New Urbanist developer I have ever worked with to create a local economy at Schooner Bay. The benefits of being able to walk to shops and services are obvious, but how do you do it in a way that survives the early years, when there aren’t enough residents to support those businesses? Engagement with the locals living around Schooner Bay is essential to develop a customer base outside Schooner Bay... and these people are very sparsely served now, with most goods and services over 25 miles away in Marsh Harbour. Schooner Bay has already begun reaching out to its neighbors with the Schooner SpringFest held recently, featuring footraces, bike races, and a day of food, music, and general good times attended by several hundred Abacoans.

   There are other ways of making shops self-sustaining early on, and they center around two questions: “How can you reduce the costs of operation?” and “Who can open a shop without needing a full income?” The principles of building smaller and smarter apply as well to shops as to homes, of course. Tiny shops have a long history in the Bahamas, where small island populations seldom supported large operations, so they should fit in naturally. Two potential types of shopkeepers come to mind when answering the second question: Retirees looking for a second career are the most likely candidates, but it’s also possible that some professionals who can live at Schooner Bay and work remotely might also run a coffee shop or the like on the side.

   In either case, expect to be able to go to Schooner Bay and not drive for days in the relatively near future. The goal is to reduce driving by 80%, which at full build-out would save $4.8 million per year. This figure, of course, doesn’t even take into account the other economic and social benefits of a local economy that allows people to make a living where they’re living.

Operating Cost Dividend

   The total dividend of the things we’ve counted above is $12.24 million per year. But to really see what it means, you have to ask “what can we buy now that we don’t have to spend that money on operating expenses?” Using a capitalization rate of 5%, this computes to an operating cost dividend of $244.8 million!

   In other words, the yearly operating cost savings are so large that a true market-based pro-forma that reflects the Ecological Dividend would look far different from a standard development pro-forma. Simply put, the Ecological Dividend is a tool that enhances all aspects of development. Those who want to build Most-Loved Places in a sustainable way should choose this lens in order to see the real impacts of their community-building choices.

   ~Steve Mouzon

   This article was first published in New Urban News in October 2011.

   Another Note: This post is part of an extended BlogOff on Return on Investment (RoI) of municipal spending. These are the posts in the BlogOff so far… please join us!

   2/24/12 - Cheapways, Steve Mouzon

   2/20/12 - The Speed Burden, Steve Mouzon

   1/27/12 - On the Street: The DNA of place and the ROI of movement, Hazel Borys

   The need for speed devours huge chunks of American cities and leaves the edges of the expressways worthless. Busy streets, for almost all of human history, created the greatest real estate value because they delivered customers and clients to the businesses operating there. This in turn cultivated the highest tax revenues in town, both from higher property taxes and from elevated sales taxes. But you can't set up shop on the side of an expressway. How can cities afford to spend so much to create thoroughfares with no adjoining property value?

   Let's first look at the four basic problems with speed:

Curves

   Increasing speed a little bit requires a big increase in the size of curves. At 20 miles per hour, any car can handle a curve with a 15 foot radius, so you'd think that tripling the speed would triple the radius, right? Wrong. At 60 miles per hour, curve radii are usually a few hundred feet, not the 45 feet you might guess.

Lane Width

   Faster roads need wider lanes. An 8 foot lane can handle 20 mile per hour traffic, but at highway speeds, you need 12 foot lanes.

Medians & Shoulders

   High-speed roads need wide medians and shoulders because a car can roll hundreds of feet beyond the point of collision or loss of control when it is traveling at highway speeds.

Number of Lanes

   It makes no sense to use all that land on either side for a two-lane highway, so high-speed thoroughfares usually have at least four lanes, often several more.

Florence vs. Atlanta Interchange

   Look at Florence above… the blocks are tiny, and the streets are never much more than hairlines. From this high up in the sky, the intersections look like sharp right angles. This is because Florence was laid out for people and horses, which can turn on a dime. Cars drive on these streets today, but they drive slowly, which is far safer for the pedestrians.

   The Atlanta interstates are each as wide as 2-3 blocks of Florence. The entire Duomo (the cathedral in the center of Florence that arguably began the Renaissance) could fit in one of the inner loops of the interchange, as you can clearly see. The central core of Florence, from the Duomo to the river, would fit inside the inner box of the interchange. The world was irreversibly changed by the people living and working in Florence who gave birth to the Renaissance. The interchange will never change the world… at best, it gets a small fraction of Atlanta workers to their jobs a bit sooner, barring any accidents.

Seaside vs. Miami - A Closer Look

   Let's analyze this at a larger scale. Each of the following two images is a half-mile wide and contains 90 acres of land or sea. The first is DPZ's Seaside, Florida, which as you may know is the birthplace of the New Urbanism. Its fabric is not so different from the scale of neighborhoods we built everywhere in the US before World War II. The second image is an urban interchange along Interstate 95 just north of downtown Miami. I selected this location because the urbanism is relatively tight here, and the curves are minimal. I could have picked something further out in suburbia that was looser, but that would be like shooting fish in a barrel.

Looking at these images, it's immediately clear that there's a lot more paving in the Miami image than in Seaside. But if you start counting blocks, you'll see that there are 27 blocks of urbanism in Seaside (even though 13 acres in the lower left corner is lost to beach and sea) while there are only 15 blocks in the Miami image, depending on what you consider a block. That gives us a pretty good hint that maybe there's more real estate value above than below.

The Speed Burden - Land Area

   One measure of land value is acreage. In Seaside, 80.5% of the available land has real estate value; only 19.5% of the land is taken up in thoroughfares. Note that I have included parks, greens, squares, and plazas as having real estate value even though they cannot be sold because studies have clearly shown that open these types of natural spaces create more real estate value in nearby lots than if they had been sold as private lots.

   Only 62.6% of the land in the Miami example has any real estate value because the thoroughfares consume 37.4% of the land. Based on Seaside, it would be reasonable to say that about 20% of the land in a traditional neighborhood should be allocated to thoroughfares. The Miami example consumes almost twice as much: 37.4%/20%-1 = an 87% Acreage Speed Burden. How can we afford to burden the land with 87% more thoroughfare acreage than necessary for a vibrant walkable environment?

The Speed Burden - Frontages

   Acreage isn't the only metric of land value. The "front foot," or length of the front property line is another metric of real estate value that is perhaps more useful than acreage. In Seaside, every single foot of frontage is full value, meaning that it either has addresses of private lots along it, or it opens into parks, greens, squares, and plazas. Even though only 77 of the 90 acres are buildable (the rest being beach and sea) Seaside has generated 36,200 feet of full-value frontage.

   The Miami example doesn't fare nearly so well. The frontages along the I-95 and its exit ramps have no value at all. Even if you wanted to open up a shop there, it's illegal to do so. There are 9,531 feet (almost two miles) of worthless frontages here. Some of the frontages are shown as "partial value." These are frontages that are either 100% side streets (no front doors) or frontages that have been ruined with big parking lots just behind the sidewalk. There are 6,303 feet of partial-value frontages in this image. That leaves 17,820 feet of full-value frontage, for a total of 33,654 feet of frontage of all types. Interestingly, Seaside generated a half-mile more frontage on 13 less buildable acres, and all of it is full-value, whereas only 52.9% of the Miami frontage is full-value. So even if Seaside had built as much on the full 90 acres instead of the 77 buildable acres, that would still be a 47.1% Speed Burden based on full-value frontages.

   How can we afford to pay so much and get so little? Cities really do need to rethink their infrastructure priorities. We are beyond the point where we can spend enormous sums of money with little or no return. Municipalities, from cities to towns, villages, and hamlets, all need to take a careful look in the mirror each time they want to spend money and ask themselves: "What is the return on this investment?"

   ~Steve Mouzon

   Note: This post is part of an extended BlogOff on Return on Investment (RoI) of municipal spending. Hazel Borys started the BlogOff with the following post… please join us!

   1/27/12 - On the Street: The DNA of place and the ROI of movement, Hazel Borys

   Another Note: This is part of an occasional series on the costs of sprawl I started in March 2011 with Costs of Sprawl - Part 1. Lots more to come… hopefully more quickly next time.

   We New Urbanists have an important choice to make, because our current rhetoric don't square up with our metrics in some important ways. If you listen to our aspirations, we'll tell you that 2/3 of Americans prefer thriving neighborhoods that are compact, mixed-use, and walkable over sprawling suburban subdivisions, and we'll tell you that those people should all be able to live that way… once we build enough of those neighborhoods and repair enough sprawl. But our rules of thumb sometimes tell a different story.

   Hazel Borys hosted a PlaceMaking@Work webinar in December with Bob Gibbs based on his new book, New Rules for Retail. The ensuing tweet chat is what started this whole Neighborhood Retail BlogOff. I haven't yet read Bob's book (it's on order) and I have high regard for him on many counts, but one of Bob's rules of thumb is that it requires 1,000 homes to support a single corner store, and more than that to support anything else. I responded by blogging that if that's so, then any neighborhood with less than 1,000 homes would have no hope of any mixed-use, and could therefore not ever be more than a residential subdivision.

   Hazel's well-reasoned reply began with a foundation of physics, leading up to a discussion of where rules can be broken in urbanism. The post is full of useful facts, but she dismisses my post because it used Seaside as an illustration, and a resort doesn't follow normal rules of thumb.

Fair enough… but the questions at the end of this post are about everyday neighborhoods instead of resorts, so I'm curious to hear her thoughts on them.

   Sandy Sorlien posted next, with a plea to "be quotidian." It's cool to have friends who are a lot smarter than me, but it does make for lots of dictionary searches. "Quotidian," it turns out, means "everyday, ordinary, or average." She goes on to explain that neighborhood retail should first of all stock regular everyday needs before even thinking about boutique products. I completely agree, and that's the point of this post as well: where do you have to go to get your basic necessities? And can you walk or bike to get there?

   Patrick Kennedy followed with pointed questions about subsidies of neighborhood retail. Without doubt, a corner store needs subsidies in a neighborhood's early years, but those subsidies boost sales because prospective homebuyers typically consider a corner store to be a significant "amenity." I put "amenity" in quotes because it's real estate jargon for something that should really be considered a necessity. Kaid Benfield tells why: because when shops and services are within walking distance, we walk more and drive less.

   John Olson makes an excellent point that retail should be adjacent to the neighborhood it serves, whereas some neighborhood diagrams show it centrally located, where it likely will fail. More on that in a later post. And then Chip Kaufman posted four additional rules of thumb for making neighborhood retail work.

   But let's get back to the central question: does the 1,000-home rule of thumb overturn our foundation principles? New Urbanists in the US have forever insisted on a quarter-mile radius as the limit of a neighborhood because that's about as far as US citizens will walk instead of driving. That radius encloses roughly 125 acres, but unless every street radiates from the center, the walks are longer, so the effective neighborhood size is closer to 100 acres. This means that unless the gross density is at least 1,000 homes / 100 acres = 10 homes/acre, you can't even have a corner store. I hate to break it to you, but only a tiny fraction of the American landscape contains more than 10 homes/acre.

   There's another way to make it work. You could have a corner store that serves 2-3 neighborhoods, but then only 1/2 to 1/3 of the people could walk to the store because everyone else would be too far away… and that only works when the gross density is at least 3-1/2 to 5 homes per acre.

   But this isn't New Urbanism for All. Instead, this is New Urbanism for the Few. Is that really what we stand for? Principles that add up to a niche market for the privileged few? I thought we were better than that… aren't we? If we're not satisfied with rules of thumb that prevent a mix of uses in every neighborhood (degrading the neighborhood to a residential subdivision) then how do we account for the experts' assertions that the retail will fail? What has to change in order for it to work? And not in some ideal future, but with the conditions on the ground today? More questions than answers… there is work to be done.

   ~Steve Mouzon

   Note: This post is part of an extended Blogoff on the viability of neighborhood retail. The most recent posts from BlogOff participants are as follows:

   1/31/12 - Chip Kaufman Guest Post - Neighborhood Retail, Chip Kaufman

   1/29/12 - Neighborhood Retail Dynamics, John Olson

   1/11/12 - When shops and services are within walking distance..., Kaid Benfield

   1/5/12 - Retail BlogOff, Patrick Kennedy

   12/28/11 - BlogOff: Neighborhood Retail, Sandy Sorlien

   12/23/11 - Retail: When it bends the rules and breaks the law, Hazel Borys

   12/21/11 - The Necessity of Hope, Steve Mouzon

Partly edible and mostly beautiful… the Children's Museum rooftop garden in Madison, Wisconsin

   Most vegetable gardens look utilitarian at best, but more often they're likely to be downright messy, often even ugly… and this is a big problem. Here's why: Most places in the US cannot nourish their inhabitants from nearby fields and waters because we've sprawled cheek-to-jowl across the landscape in such a way that dedicated farmlands are often miles away. So without a lot of building demolition, the best hope for becoming Nourishable rests in embedding edible gardens within the urban fabric of the neighborhoods.

   If those edible gardens were lovable, they would be easy to embed because many people would want them. But if they're unlovable, then they're not so much of a good neighbor, and more likely to be shunned or outright banned, like this Oak Park, Michigan garden. To be fair, the Oak Park garden isn't downright ugly… but it's not beautiful, either, and that's just enough to bring out the opposition.

   So what do we need to do? Currently, most places in the US have no living traditions of beautiful edible gardens, so we need to create new traditions. A living tradition begins with a single insight by one person. That person creates an ideal version of something based on their insight. If that person has enough passion, they can transform their insight into a personal cause. If that cause is compelling enough, it can spread to other people in the same locality or distributed hive, and the ideal gets replicated by these other people. If the ideal and its progeny is a good enough fit for regional conditions, climate, and culture, the cause spreads to the culture at large and becomes a movement. If that movement travels across generations, it becomes a living tradition. Check out this post which describes in greater detail the transformation from insight to living tradition.

   We're clearly at the beginning of this process right now, and more of us need to be thinking of ways to make edible gardens lovable. I  had one insight recently which I believe can help: we need to create an "agricultural aesthetic" that can guide lovable garden design.

   In the early years of the Modernist movement in architecture, the pioneers spoke early and often about the "machine aesthetic." Simply put, they wanted to make buildings look like they were products of the assembly line, and they wanted to do it artfully. This ideal guided the first several decades of Modernism.

   The Agricultural Aesthetic is based on a parallel question: how can we take the common artifacts of edible gardens and compose them artfully to create gardens that are lovable? The images in this blog post aren't the final product; they're merely the toolkit of raw elements from which we might create an Agricultural Aesthetic. Here's how some of these elements might be used:

Sticks & Twine

   These elements have traditionally been used to create light structures for vining vegetables. They also are occasionally used as shown here, to build a very light "honor system" fence. I'm seeing the same uses, but more artfully considered, especially with the twine. Beautiful twine web-work could be woven quickly if not too complex, and the materials are quite inexpensive, so there's no heavy penalty for using a lot of twine.

Terra Cotta Pots

   Gardeners have started plants in terra cotta pots probably for centuries, and most herbs are small enough to spend their entire lives in them. Terra cotta is colored similarly to most gourds, but the unadorned pots have a more matte surface. Simple pots are rounded like gourds, but tapering into a truncated cone, and are more regularly-shaped than gourds. My first thought is that they, too, would benefit from composition in larger quantities than usual. And because they have flat bottoms, they stay put, unlike gourds. Consider a wall of herbs in terra cotta pots, each tipped a bit by whatever sort of bracket it's hung from. They also could be stacked up to form the steep outer wall of an embankment. And once they're broken, their shards could be used as paving material set lightly into the earth from which they came.

Stones

   Gardens in most places are planted on land that is at least somewhat rocky, and stones can turn up while tilling or cultivating even after many years of gardening. They could be discarded, but why not use them in the garden? The can make excellent walls, from a simple dry-stack farm wall to a thin mortared serpentine wall. They also can be stacked into markers or monuments, like the one shown here. They can also be used to build the walls of the water channels we'll discuss in a moment. These elements have all been built in gardens for centuries, usually in utilitarian fashion. But it's easy to imagine a stone wall taking many artful forms. And if stone is considered to be a candidate material for different art forms, then the possibilities expand dramatically. Just look at what the Japanese have done with small stones and gravel in their gardens.

Gourds

   Dried gourds have many uses in the garden. They are most often seen in homemade martin houses, as these voracious bug-eating birds love to nest in the dry and secure confines of a hollowed-out gourd. They also make good ladles, and are useful for storing many small items, provided that the surface they're sitting on doesn't allow them to tip over. But how do you treat them artfully? Their shapes are soft and slightly unique, with a bit of surface sheen. I'm thinking that an artful composition of gourds needs greater quantities than the dozen or less that normally make up a martin house.

Vines & Branches

   Fruit trees and grape vines can be much more fruitful if pruned vigorously. This generates a lot of vine and branch clippings. They are often discarded or shredded into mulch, but there are much better uses. Vines and branches that are supple enough can be woven into a dense fabric that us useful for many things, including fence panels. Woven more loosely, they can be used as a sun screen on an arbor. Somewhat thicker vines and branches can be used to construct a lattice suitable for training beans, peas, or other vining vegetables. The thickest branches have a number of potential uses, including as arbor purlins. All of these uses are arguably artful in their current form, owing to the beautiful textures of the vines and branches. But think for a moment of the possibilities if they were consciously elevated to an art form!

Water

   Water is the life-blood of the garden, but at some seasons of the year, it may also need to be carried away as well. Hoses and sprinklers can do the former job, and simple site grading can do the latter, but those methods are so boring. What if the act of bringing water to the garden or taking it away was celebrated? Both supply and drainage might begin with a network of water channels through the garden. Water channels have been used to great effect in wonderful gardens in many parts of the world. But the real celebration might come somewhere between the channel and the plants. There might, for example, be some place where the water emerges from the channels, glittering in the light and burbling softly, before disappearing again into a funnel leading to the soaker hoses. Or maybe you have an entirely different idea. In any case, water has a long history of celebrated use in ornamental gardens… why not celebrate water that much in an edible garden as well?

   Maybe that's enough for now… let's discuss these possibilities and see what else we can come up with. What do you think?

   ~Steve Mouzon