ArchitectureWeek - Building - New Urbanism in Charlotte

One of these — Birkdale Village, designed by Shook Kelley — displays some obvious signs of success, from the numbers of people out on a weekend to the sign on a neighbor's lawn inviting people over for a wine mixer at 7:00 p.m.

Its cafes overflow, and its shops — Sharper Image, Gap, Ann Taylor Loft, and others — draw residents as well as visitors from the surrounding area. Apartments above the shops offer urban-style living, while condos and starter homes on small lots circle around the main street. Larger homes and hiking trails fan out towards the fringes.

But there are no grocery stores, a key element in creating a walkable neighborhood.

New Urbanism, VMT, and Climate

Douglas Farr's pithy comment that the greenest green building in The pithy comment by Douglas Farr that the greenest green building in a sprawl location is less green than a standard well-designed building in a compact urban location spotlights an underlying issue of mastadon scale.

Dense development made highly livable through New Urbanist design will typically help reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT), a simple measure of transportation usage closely correlated to the increasingly important transportation carbon footprint — if the density is built in a compact urban location, well-served by frequent public transit.

But when density is built up in outlying areas — outside the urban core, but even within the outer urban ring — even with the quality that New Urban design can facilitate — such outlying density will typically increase total VMT for a region, due to the geographic increase in driving per capita, multiplied by the increased number of people due to density. VMT map example

Just how fundamental the geography-of-VMT issue is can be understood in the context of regional carbon footprint calculations. At the same time as virtually every U.S. metropolitan planning area is seeing steady increases in both total VMT and VMT per capita, it appears that deep reductions in VMT will be required to reach any reasonable carbon reduction targets, such as those recently adopted by several states.

The problem isn't density. In fact, density in the right place helps, and high-quality density is exactly what most American communities need more of. But when density is increased in the wrong locations, it can actually worsen many of the problems it is intended to help solve — and it is likely to break the bank in carbon emissions.

The deep changes in planning necessary to account for the geography of VMT will be a bitter pill for many planners and developers to swallow, and many (or most) regional plans need to be revised to take it into account.

As U.S. communities confront the geography of VMT, the crushing costs of sprawl will increasingly be recognized, and the need for vast amounts of close-in urban redevelopment will increasingly be clear. For climate reasons, it will need to be walkable, transit-oriented, high-density, and mixed-use, and to attract the needed in-migration of residents, it will need to be beautiful as well.

New Urbanism, applied in the right places, can be a vital tool to help accomplish this generational reconstruction.

Discuss

"At Birkdale, the developers tried their best to get a grocery store chain," says Shook, "but they wouldn't go." He called the grocery store "the Holy Grail of New Urban communities," and identified it as one of the most challenging aspects to master.

"The supermarket industry believes, and with some justification, that those [smaller] models are not sustainable or profitable." Supermarkets rely on high turnover to earn minimal profits, and smaller formats remain a challenge for them, according to Shook, who spoke at the 16th Congress for the New Urbanism in Austin, Texas, in April 2008.

"People come to us now and say, 'I want a Birkdale,' and we laugh and say it was like software version 1.0," Shook says. "We're at about version 3.5 now."

Birkdale is served by the Charlotte express bus system, but Vermillion, a New Urban community about two miles (three kilometers) away, banked on the arrival of a train from Charlotte for its growth. In 1996 Vermillion won a Sierra Club award for its initial design, by New Urbanist pioneers Duany Plater-Zyberk Company, which included a new school, a neighborhood swimming and recreational club, and additional planned retail.

But the train still hasn't come, and now seems less likely due to funding problems. And only one small cafe and a few offices line Vermillion's brick-front old-style town square. New 4,000-square–foot (370-square-meter) houses on suburban-sized lots signal a shift in the developer's strategy to try to attract more residents.

One might ask how success could be better ensured when community planning depends on infrastructure or other support from outside.

Baxter Village, located in Fort Mill, South Carolina, about 14 miles (23 kilometers) south of Charlotte's city center, remains the most mature and sustainable example of New Urban planning in the region. Designed by Urban Design Associates (UDA) of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Baxter Village started with a master plan after exhaustive research of the historic architectural design of homes.

UDA examined area landscapes and lawns, and reflected on locals' relationship to space and their surroundings, and put together a pattern book as a guideline for builders in constructing the properties, based on Traditional Neighborhood Design. Housing is constructed in what UDA calls the "upcountry South Carolina" style, which includes classical revival, colonial revival with full-front porches, and Victorian styles.

"The developers required that the community should look as if it had been there 100 years," says Kerri Robusto, director of marketing, sales and leasing at Clear Springs Development, developer of Baxter. >>>