URBAN MORPHOLOGY - urban-design-group.org.uk

Left The typical big mess looks the same in every
American suburb
Opposite page The disorderly, wildly scaled
environment along the main arterial contrasts with
orderly nearby subdivisions. Cincinnati, Ohio 1994
TOPIC
Parking needs to be
shoved to the back,
so pedestrians can
have a presence on
the street
approval. Zoning has very minimal consequences for physical
development, mostly controlling land use (in America, an
economic term rather than typological one) and setbacks or
land cover. Subdivision approval depends on conformance with
standard street widths and utilities and rarely is the evaluation
of the plan itself a question. While both of these could be used to
develop friendlier and better-designed areas, they usually are not.
In any case, both are ill-fitted tools for urban design.
Current commercial types are another resistant force.
Today’s stores are completely out of scale with the idealised
neighbourhood business district. Even the most minimal
grocery stores have a footprint that would overwhelm a walking
district, which demands a comfortable distance between stores.
Parking needs to be shoved to the back, so pedestrians can have
a presence on the street – with large and deep stores, customers
have to enter from the rear (isn’t this really just a backwards strip
centre?) or walk more than 100 feet from the edge of parking
along the wall of a large store. Drive-in banks and fast food,
gas stations, tire centres, auto dealers, and huge home centre
stores also have no place in the idealized village because these
typologies demand a car dominant culture.
The large size of stores and their consolidation into
unrelenting corporate formulas is the result of economies of
scale, distribution systems and fierce competition. Of course the
larger commercial typologies are only the beginning - the large
grocery store eventually gives way to the super, mega, giga-store.
When neighbourhood business districts were contained within
neighbourhoods, there were one or two of them occurring about
every square mile. Their catchment areas were small, and the
scale of retail square footage was small, about 50-70,000 square
feet altogether for many small stores. Traffic coming to and fro
was neighbourhood traffic, some of it on foot, making it not a bad
next-door neighbour, even for a single-family house. Now, that
amount of retail footage, much more efficiently laid out, can be
found in a single large drug store, which naturally has to serve a
much larger catchment area, which means more people and more
traffic. Move up a scale to the super-centre, itself more than four
times the size of a single neighbourhood business district and
pulling from many miles. Even more traffic and huge parking and
delivery systems make it a miserable neighbour, and it demands a
high-volume street, not a little neighbourhood street.
The demand for retail locations with
high volumes of traffic has gone hand
in hand with the development of the
pattern of development in the suburbs
that funnels all local traffic in a sector
into one arterial, by means of the lack of
connection between subdivisions. The
resulting quiet streets of the housing are
thus a contributor to the cancer itself.
It turns out to be much easier to
make the fundamental changes in the
residential fabric that new urbanism
and smart growth advocates suggest
(smaller lots, connected streets, alleyways,
housing type mix) than to tackle the
problem of commercial strips. One can
even build small commercial villages
within these idealised neighbourhoods,
but these cannot displace the strip itself.
Fundamental international distribution
systems, an entire real estate finance
industry, huge international corporations,
an ingrained expectation about the
role of planners, common real estate
development typologies, and even the nice
people on their cul-de-sacs will continue
to overwhelm the ideal. The big mess will
continue.
Brenda Scheer is the Dean of the College of
Architecture and Planning at the University of Utah.
She is a planner and an architect.
Urban Design | Winter 2005 | Issue 93 | 27