Kaid Benfield: More walkable urban development is good. But is it good enough?

We’re looking at an older, complete neighborhood, to be sure. But there’s also something else going on:  there’s a great public space, and the buildings are of varied heights, widths, scales, and styles.  They are also varied in age, meaning that some older buildings were retained as newer ones came in. This is an example of what architect Liz Dunn, director of the Preservation Green Lab for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, calls “urban grain.”  In an interview with Julia Levitt, published on The Atlantic’s National Channel website, she elaborates:

“There are many possible interpretations of the phrase ‘urban grain’ or ‘granularity’ that have to do with the scale and composition of cities. A lot of work has gone into analyzing the street grid — for example, the size of blocks within a grid. I’m personally most interested in block-scapes, and the elements that coexist within a block or set of blocks.

“I think there is a set of attributes here that is both recognizable and useful for policy making. I think we could be measuring, for example, the economic and social activity that occurs on blocks that have a larger number and variety of skinnier buildings, compared to what you find on blocks occupied by large, homogeneous building fronts. Measuring how the pattern and mix of buildings impacts urban activity would provide a way to assign value to organic, incremental development that would be more quantitative than the cultural arguments for preservation, which would in turn inform land use policies. There are many win-win solutions for balancing urban grain with new development.”

While Dunn primarily considers the issue with respect to finding the proper mix of old and new buildings and styles, I think she’s on to something that also applies more broadly.  It may be more challenging to develop and zone blocks for variety, or to construct and implement public policy that fosters it, than it is to accept uniformity – and in this economy it’s challenging to do most anything with regard to real estate; but, if we fail to insist on the kinds of places that people instinctively love, we won’t succeed, and we won’t deserve to, either.  I’m not sure that some of the buildings shown at the top of the post aren’t just more sprawl in a vertical rather than horizontal form.

Source: irishboyinlondon