Comments on: Defining a new traditional urbanism

By: цarьchitect

цarьchitect — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:02:46 +0000

Mattheiu, I think you’ve summed up one of the levels of tradition that’s overlooked, but is the most important kind of tradition in urban design. In the best cities, the town itself is the tradition – all the styles and building techniques are traditions as well (of course. It works on two levels: not only employing working paradigms and introduction and adaptation of new ones, but also literally revising, adapting, and growing the physical structure of the city. There are countless examples of thing – I’m sure you’ve said as much in different words. But I think that manifest tradition is a succinct term to describe the result.

By: Jonathan Heyman

Jonathan Heyman — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:02:53 +0000

Superb!

By: Mathieu Helie

Mathieu Helie — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:11:23 +0000

The point of changing the planning system is not to shackle developers from doing things we don’t like, but making it valuable for them to do things in a more natural pattern. So “the city” as a corporation doesn’t really even have to get involved. It just has to loosen the planning system to allow the developers to benefit from adopting traditional urbanism. (Sustainable development has to be profitable to be sustainable.) One of the reasons why big development is prevalent is the fixed costs involved in getting planning approval, so that if you build two projects concurrently instead of one big project, it costs twice as much. But if those costs are eliminated, then suddenly every little patch of land becomes precious, and becomes even more precious if the development gradually improves on its architectural quality over time. The incentive is for the developer to keep some plots in reserve.

By: epar

epar — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:44:19 +0000

Another excellent article. I’m currently thinking about how to apply traditional urbanist principles to the Boston waterfront but I worry about how ownership issues could undermine them. What you’ve got is a handful of large landowners sitting on a lot of parking lots and otherwise underutilized land. Now that office development is spilling over from downtown and convention center areas, they’re all set to develop a set of ritzy megablocks, with condos, chi chi retail, office space, etc. The result would be yet another exclusive, inward-oriented area of the city (the funny thing is that the city’s vision along the channel separating the downtown from the seaport is of a “historic European waterfront”). Now suppose the city actually adopted traditional urbanism, acquired the waterfront parcels, and auctioned them off to numerous individuals who could build under the codes you describe. What is to prevent the original land owners from repurchasing the parcels, assembling them, and proceeding with their original plans? It almost seems like the huge land values backed by large concentrations of capital would circumscribe any traditional urbanism experiment.

By: Mac

Mac — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:11:51 +0000

In response to the above comment, I would say that the author did cover the relation of buildings to their environment with:

“If instead of drawing the full plans, the proposals simply supplied the component patterns and a parameter space for them, then there could be an infinite variety of different instances of these patterns populating the new space, all fitting a particular need and applying a specific method of returning to equilibrium. If we wanted to release control even more, we could define some buildings from the neighborhood as models and whatever patterns they featured as automatically approved.”

Thus no buyer could buy up a peice of property and throw a large parking lot in there, or a structure that does not relate to the neighbourhood: it would have to follow the approved patterns that have been pre-adopted and approved.

By: Scott

Scott — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 02:51:02 +0000

Very informative conversation, thanks.

Unfortunately I think you are missing a crucial piece of information explaining how one would ensure that buildings actually begin to relate to each other when they are built not at the same time and by different people.

There are many examples of this not being the case, ORDOS being a fine example. I am sure that there are also examples of individual projects being constructed in an existing urban fabric that do not improve the area at all.