John Canuso, a Voorhees, N.J., builder who is trying to build a downtown center for the sprawl in the New Jersey suburbs west of Philadelphia, has a picture on his office wall.
It`s a quintessential small-town scene from a bygone age, showing kids, mothers and elderly folk milling around a thick-trunked tree on a sidewalk in front of a row of shops.
Some might call it too cute and corny, but to the 49-year-old Canuso it is a reminder of the warm, colorful scenes he grew up with in his close-knit, Italian neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
Like great numbers of his post-World War II generation, Canuso became thoroughly ”Americanized,” he says, and moved from the inner city to the suburbs.
”But after 25 years as a builder in the suburbs, I found they lacked things that were there where my parents and grandparents lived,” he said. Among those things, said Canuso, were a sense of community identity and tradition, a feeling of neighborliness.
These qualities, he perceived, appeared present even on the make-believe Main Street at Disney World. ”There you have a sense of love and security, and you can talk to people. You try to talk to people at the Cherry Hill Mall, people think you`re strange.” Cherry Hill is a suburb of 75,000 people adjacent to Voorhees with a mall but no town center.
Canuso is now into his eighth year of developing the Main Street center in the 25,000-population municipality of Voorhees, which he hopes will give people who live both there and in Cherry Hill a place to meet and talk without feeling strange.
Main Street is a mixed-use project on 50 acres that includes offices, shops, restaurants, townhouses, condos and a town hall-like community center in a high-density complex designed to bring in people and have them walk around, just as in the picture Canuso has in his office.
Canuso is part of a growing movement among builders, architects and land planners to bring a new sense of community into suburban America by going back to old town plans that seem more people-friendly than the typical suburb built in the past few decades.
”People feel that building since World War II in the suburbs has produced somewhat chaotic and unsatisfactory environments, but they don`t know why,” said Roger Lewis, a University of Maryland professor of architecture and Washington Post columnist who appeared with Canuso on a panel at last month`s National Association of Home Builders convention in Atlanta.
Those who have found the fault lies in the way suburbs are laid out have rediscovered the plans of the past, Lewis said. Their models are not only Disney World`s Main Street and inner-city Philadelphia but such classic spots as Williamsburg, Va.; Savannah, Ga.; Charleston, S.C.; and Annapolis, Md.
Lewis said the charm and human scale of such places derive from their sense of orderliness. ”They have a coherence, a sense of center often missing in American suburbs,” he contended.
The acknowledged founder of the movement is Andres Duany, a Miami-based architect who came to national prominence with his design for Seaside, Fla., an 80-acre Florida Panhandle development intended to have the look and feel of a small 19th Century town, with frame houses with front porches on narrow lots set on short, straight streets.
Duany and his wife, architect Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, have been active propagandists for neo-traditional town planning over the past few years, helping developers plan new communities in various parts of the country and speaking widely on the topic.
Recent trends have conspired to give their words an ever wider acceptance. The materialistic 1980s have given way to a decade in which people talk more about tradition and family, environmentalism has sharpened the focus on careful land planning, and energy-consciousness has revived walking to work or to shop as a virtue.
Todd Zimmerman, a New Jersey-based planner and housing researcher who was on the convention panel on neo-traditional planning, noted that this year`s session was packed while a similar offering last year drew only a handful.
”The turnout is indicative of a significant change in the last 12 months,” he said.
While the neo-traditionalists have their differences, several key community planning concepts are crucial to the movement:
– A strong attention to central public spaces, such as parks, plazas and even street intersections.
In typical suburbs, public spaces are development stepchilds, said panel member Jay Parker, president of HOH Associates, a land planning and landscape architect firm in Alexandria, Va. ”We`re used to seeing open space as leftover, back-door space,” he said.
But such spaces, neo-traditionalists contend, give identity to a neighborhood, create landmarks that make it easy to maintain a sense of direction and invite people out of doors to intermingle.
”You need to create a platform on which people can perform,” said Zimmerman, who pointed to the Campo, a renowned public square in Siena, Italy, as a model.
In a recent visit there, he said, ”we could see these dynamics going on before our eyes, with boys and girls and grandmas and kids. It`s been working there for more than 900 years.”
A corollary to the importance of public spaces is the need to give a prominent place to public buildings such as churches and community centers.
”Churches give a community a feeling of permanence and stability whether you`re religious or not,” said Parker.
– Orderly road systems, which contribute to goals of neighborhood identity and ease of orientation as public spaces and buildings do.
Lewis said the typical suburb represents an example of ”varicose vein”
street planning, with roads meandering into cul-de-sacs in a pattern resembling grape vines.
What`s needed instead, he said, are ”recognizable geometries imposed by designers on the landscape but taking into account the ecology.”
Duany has been criticized for what some think is an overemphasis on simple grid plans, such as are found in Chicago and many older suburbs, but Lewis noted that grids can be broken when the landscape requires.
”The wonderful thing about regularity and order is that you can interrupt it for special conditions, and people automatically feel that`s attractive,” he said.
– Pedestrian-friendly streets.
”The public street in the usual subdivision is not a public street, it`s really a demilitarized zone,” said Parker. ”You can`t even put a barbecue or lawn chairs out there because it`s low-class.”
The reason for this, neo-traditionalists say, is because subdivision streets and garage-and-driveway-dominated front yards are made for vehicles, not people.
Handling the relationship between the car and the pedestrian is one of the thorniest problems neo-traditionalists have to tackle. They generally advocate narrower streets with more intersections, but here they are often in conflict with town officials who are more concerned about the car flows and municipal vechicle turning radiuses than pedestrians.
”We still see streets 37 feet wide that you could land a 747 on. It`s absolutely destroying the environment,” said Mark Tipton, a Raleigh, N.C., home builder who is president of the National Association of Home Builders, speaking at another convention gathering.
”Traffic engineers don`t believe autos can go any slower than 30 miles an hour,” said Zimmerman.
Other techniques advocated for attracting people to the streets are bringing the houses closer to the curbs, shifting garages to the back of the house and encouraging front porches. In Seaside, in fact, front porches are required by community regulation.
”We need a welcoming zone in front,” said Parker. ”At my grandma`s, we had tea out on the front porch. There`s not a lot of action in back unless you`re really interested in squirrels.”
– The integration of residential, commercial and retail land uses.
Since the 1920s, municipal zoning ordinances have tended more and more to enforce a separation of uses, so that residential areas won`t be encroached upon by supposedly incompatible shops and businesses.
And residential areas themselves are frequently zoned so that one-acre lots are here, half-acre lots there, quarter-acre lots way over there, and townhouses and apartment buildings some other place.
The neo-traditionalists advocate re-integrating these elements into what Parker called ”a fine-grained mixture of uses.”
A key concept in this integration is the combining of residential and retail on a community Main Street, often with condos or apartments over shops and restaurants in the manner familiar to Chicagoans or residents of most other big cities.
Advocates say the mix of uses creates a more vibrant street life and reduces the need for driving. The problem with such an arrangement in the new communities built so far has been keeping the retail elements going.
”The key is retail,” said Zimmerman. ”Over the years, housing over retail has not been a problem. Retail under housing is the challenge. You`ve got to create a critical mass with a conglomeration of pedestrians.”
Most neo-traditionalists point out, however, that a retail presence, which generally requires a large community, is not essential for their style of planning.
”Retail is not the sine qua non of traditional planning,” said Lewis.
”You can do traditional planning on 20-acre, 50-acre or 100-acre sites. On a different scale you can even see its effect on two acres.”
The question yet to be answered is whether a significant number of people want to live in a subdivision designed like Colonial Williamsburg, for all its seeming virtues.
A public accustomed to the typical subdivision, with its winding roads and homes centered on relatively large lots, well isolated from each other and the street, may not easily accept the neo-traditionalist layouts, with their relatively high densities and urban streetscapes. In the popular mind that is not, after all, the picture of the American dream.
”If you orient buildings to the street, will there really be buyers?”
asked Zimmerman. ”The only answer is to research the psychographics.”
Such market research will no doubt play its part in modifying some of the ideas of the neo-traditionalists in the years to come. Perhaps the suburban landscapes of the future, said Zimmerman, will feature ”very high density in neo-traditional neighborhoods, then conventional subdivisions, then farms.”
However neo-traditionalized planning works to change the face of suburbia, it is not a passing fad, its advocates say.
”The need to develop tradition in the suburbs is incredible,” said Canuso. ”A mall doesn`t meet the need to develop tradition.”
