New resources

1. Placemaking. Placemaking is the next stage of rebuilding community and successful center cities. It focuses on all the qualities of place or livability and it's why what I write about in this blog is pretty wide ranging.

Readers might think all I care about is transit (and walking and bicycling) because I write about it so much. But I only write about transit so much because focusing mobility away from the automobile is key to maximizing livability and the qualities of place, and because efficient and effective mobility beyond the automobile is key to the economic success and competitiveness of the center city, in particular Washington.

The Project for Public Spaces has been contracted by the Metropolitan Planning Council (of Chicago) to support a massive placemaking initiative in Greater Chicago. As a result, many of the great materials they have developed over the years are available online, free to all, at the website Placemaking Chicago.

Use the tools with foresight.

2. Infill Development and Design. Portland Oregon's Infill Design Toolkit is another useful resource. The objective of the infill design project is:

to improve the design of multidwelling and rowhouse development in neighborhoods outside Portland’s Central City. The project’s primary focus is development in the low- and medium-density multidwelling zones (R1, R2, and R3), located primarily along transit corridors, and similar development in commercial zones.

The Infill Design Toolkit is composed of sections on:

Strategies—highlighting "best practices" for integrating new development into neighborhood patterns and showing how to identify these patterns.

Prototypes—illustrating "approvable" housing types and configurations that are suitable for common infill situations, meet City regulations and design objectives, and are market feasible.

Technical Pages—providing more detailed, technical information on strategies that can contribute toward contextually-appropriate infill design. Includes pieces on structured parking and on transportation and emergency access requirements relevant to site design.

Project Profiles—providing information on completed projects with design features that contribute to meeting the community's design objectives. The profiles are followed by examples of historic Portland housing and international precedents.

Neighborhood Design Policies—a compilation of policies and other design guidance from Portland's adopted neighborhood and community plans.

This should be an issue in DC. If we are to sensitively add residents to the city, we will have to do it in areas around transit and in commercial districts. I personally do not advocate (generally) tearing down lower density often historic housing in favor of higher density housing. Therefore we are going to have to be strategic in how we best use the land opportunities that exist.

Theoretically, I could say that one of the reasons that people have a hard time grappling with adding density to neighborhoods in appropriate ways is that we don't have good models for doing so. That's not actually true. We have some of the best models around, in what already exists. Ironically, models of development in DC from say 1880 to 1935 serve as models for New Urbanism in the region and around the country. (And the originals are still often better than the new stuff.)

But a similar toolkit for DC could help. So to could better defining planning practices, and distinguishing between citywide planning objectives and neighborhood objectives, when doing neighborhood (small area) plans.

Neighborhoods generally don't want any change. (This is a slight overstatement.) What people do want is active successful neighborhood serving retail, neighborhood schools and other civic assets, and frequent, efficient, and inexpensive transit.

To do this you have to have a goodly number of neighborhood residents as customers, school children, etc., as well as serving as income sources for the government's coffers--paying property, sales, and income taxes--to support all the things that people want as part and parcel of a livable city.

3. Historic Preservation.

It pains me to no end all the @#$%^&*()_+ ridiculous anti-historic preservation bulls*** in DC, that we can read in local community newspapers such as the Current, not very good columns by the otherwise fine columnist, Marc Fisher, for the Washington Post, and even in the good government e-newsletter themail published by the citizien watchdog group, DC Watch.

The qualities of the City of Washington that are most cherished, interesting historic architecture, quality neighborhoods, pedestrian-centric urban design, and identity and authenticity, were preserved in the city by historic preservationists during the many decades that local leaders thought (they still do) that remaking the city over for automobility was the future for the city--you see this both in the urban renewal agenda such as exhibited by how Southwest DC was redeveloped as a test case for urban renewal (SW DC looked just like Capitol Hill...) and the community development corporation agenda of tearing down "old" (historic) housing in favor of building ugly senior apartment buildings, cheap garden apartment complexes, even cheaper strip shopping centers such as the Nehemiah Center on 14th Street NW in Columbia Heights, and boxy ugly office buildings.

Now that people, generally, want to move back to the city, we have to worry about what kind of city they want to live in. If they desire to reshape it for the automobile, we are doomed.

Just like I might be wooley-eyed and believe that "if we only had a good infill design toolkit then neighborhood activists would begin making better decisions and recommendations with regard to development projects" I do believe that we haven't been updating arguments in favor of historic preservation in face of new residents lacking the history of the city's long period of disinvestment and lack of demand, the rise of property rights sentiments, and basic livability issues.

(Remember a few months ago, I mentioned the updated Montgomery County Historic Preservation Guidelines which do a good job of trying to do this by adding sections on the history of the County and a page on each historic district, so that people have a better understanding of how history guides decisionmaking about historic preservation and the creation of historic preservation districts.)

So I wonder if all these great reports produced by the Getty Institute for the City of Los Angeles, if recast in the light of Washington, DC would help us make better arguments here?