SOLVING SPRAWL, PART 2

TEN PRINCIPLES FOR SMART GROWTH ON
THE SUBURBAN FRINGE: SOLVING SPRAWL

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) published Ten Principles for Smart Growth on the Suburban Fringe to outline clear, attainable methods for solving the sprawl riddle while building the best urbanism possible. With examples adapted from the ULI text, those "10 Commandments" are:

1) Create a Shared Vision for the Future . . . and Stick to It
A successful visioning process is rooted in a community’s landowners, developers, elected officials, environmental groups, citizen activist groups, and local business. Temptations will emerge that run counter to the vision in the form of appealing short-term economic development opportunities. If a way cannot be found to make the proposal enhance the vision, it should be rejected.

2) Identify and Sustain Green Infrastructure
Green infrastructure is a network of habitat, parks, greenways, conservation easements, and working lands sustaining native species, natural ecological processes, plus air and water resources. Between 1982 and 1997, the amount of urbanized land in the U.S. increased by 47 percent while the nation’s population grew by only 17 percent. Considering those numbers, it becomes obvious that green infrastructure is a community’s natural life-support system and must be strategically planned and managed as carefully as built infrastructure.

3) Remember that the Right Design in the Wrong Place Is Not Smart Growth
Traditional design -- with its back alleys, front porches and spaces where kids play and neighbors congregate -- is a critical, but not the only component of smart growth. Design must be integrated with local climate, land conditions, transportation facilities predictable and economically viable development that preserves open space and natural resources, infrastructure that serves existing and new residents, compact development such as new town centers, and other factors that take an holistic approach to stamping out sprawl.

4) Protect Environmental Systems and Conserve Resources
Take advantage of building orientation, prevailing winds and tree cover for cooling. Manage the effect of the sun’s rays for enhancing or limiting heating. Conserve water by using conservation-designed appliances and plumbing fixtures, harvested graywater, recycled water and natural (non-piped) drainage systems and pervious paving to recharge aquifers.

5) Provide Diverse Housing Types and Opportunities
Direct growth to walkable mixed-use subdivisions that offer more diverse housing types such as: rental and ownership single-family houses with yards, townhouses and multifamily apartment buildings to meet the varied lifestyles of people living in the suburbs.

6) Build Centers of Concentrated Mixed Uses
Sustainable urbanized fringe development has a convenient mix that meets people’s daily needs: homes, schools, stores, services, amenities. A concentration of mixed uses on the fringe provides a critical mass and a sense of place that gives communities a strong identity and a heart. Mixed-use projects create a destination with housing, employment, retail and public services. Successful communities include a full range of uses and activities: office, retail, entertainment, hotels, housing and civic institutions.

7) Use Multiple Connections to Enhance Mobility and Circulation
Traffic congestion is horrible in conventional suburbs because clusters of residential subdivisions with only one entry and one exit concentrate the traffic onto and off arterial roads, which quickly become clogged because of the lack of connectivity and alternative routes. To avoid becoming a placeless collection of disaggregated subdivisions, a network made up of vehicular, pedestrian, cycling, park, and open-space connections must be planned. Communities should create a template for a street grid with a hierarchy of connected streets to guide development and promote connectivity.

8) Deliver Sustainable Transportation Choices
Smart growth communities provide a range of transportation choices, but to be sustainable, these alternatives must be built in rather than added later to a car-based culture. Staged development of real estate and transportation facilities ensures that a range of options will be available to travelers—walking, cycling, transit, carpooling, telecommuting, and driving—and that each will be adequately supported.

9) Preserve the Community’s Character
America’s commercial landscape, largely due to the proliferation of chain stores and franchises, has deteriorated from the unique to uniform, from stylized to standardized. National franchises and chain stores can change their standard building designs to fit local character, but only do so in communities savvy enough to reject off the shelf architecture and demand customized, site-specific design that addresses local historic preservation, site planning, and vernacular architectural concerns.

10) Make It Easy to Do the Right Thing
One major barrier to better development on the fringe is local regulation. Most local zoning and subdivision regulations make it easier and faster to build conventional low-density auto-dependent developments than undertake smart growth on the suburban fringe. Developers build sprawling projects because they are easier and cheaper to construct. Local officials should make local regulations more flexible to encourage mixed uses, narrower streets, compact development, and other smart practices.

Editor's Note: Tomorrow, we will feature a brief post script to the 10 principles.