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A comprehensive full-color guide to applying new urbanist and green methodologies to urban and suburban growth.
From the authors of Suburban Nation, this full-color manual explains how to implement the strategies of new urbanism, green design, and urban sustainability. You will learn how to create and enhance mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly communities as an alternative to suburban sprawl. Sprawl, which evolved after World War II, is not a smart growth system - it does not pay for itself financially; it consumes land at an alarming rate; it produces transportation problems; and it promotes social inequity.
The Smart Growth Manual presents a clear blueprint for developing cities and suburbs in the most user-friendly, cost-efficient, and environmentally sustainable manner. The book covers preservation of natural amenities and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Neighborhood Development, and is lavishly illustrated with important examples of built work by leading urban designers.
Everyone is calling for smart growth . . . but what exactly is it?
In The Smart Growth Manual, two leading city planners provide a thorough answer. From the expanse of the metropolis to the detail of the window box, they address the pressing challenges of urban development with easy-to-follow advice and a broad array of best practices.
With their landmark book Suburban Nation, Andres Duany and Jeff Speck "set forth more clearly than anyone has done in our time the elements of good town planning" (The New Yorker). With this long-awaited companion volume, the authors have organized the latest contributions of new urbanism, green design and healthy communities into a comprehensive handbook, fully illustrated with the built work of the nation's leading practitioners.
Excerpt from the Introduction
What Is this Manual For?
This manual is intended to be a central resource for those who intend to put smart growth into practice and to assess the work of those who purport to do so. While there are many good publications on this topic, we have not found any single one that attempts this role. It is presumptuous of us to claim this ground, and we expect as many critics as supporters of this effort. But the issues are too important to be left to those with less experience building new places and fixing old ones.
Some people will find that this manual says too little. Its goal was not to catalog all aspects of good development practice, but rather to emphasize those that need attention. This explains why it is a single book and not a multi-volume encyclopedia. Most of the items in this manual would benefit from a longer discussion than is offered. The quick argument of each point - which threatens to make light of some important issues - results from the desire for both a wide scope and a narrow spine; so does the limited amount of design theory and supporting documentation. Above all, this publication is meant to be handy. It was written with a realistic attitude about how few books are actually read, particularly by those people busy building things. We would rather see these pages criticized for their brevity than avoided for their length.
On the other hand, there are some artistically inclined spirits who will find that this manual says far too much. Its high level of specificity is the product of a long experience that has led us to value the known over the speculative. Simply put, we believe that new places should be designed in the manner of existing places that work. Humans have been building settlements for a long time, and there is much to be known about their success and failure. The most spectacular failures of the recent past were attempts to replace time-tested models with unprecedented inventions.
While we sometimes wish it were otherwise, planning is a technique more than an art. As in medicine or the law, its evolution should be constant but must occur atop a foundation of knowledge collected through the centuries. Any design can be considered clever simply by being novel, but it cannot be trusted until it has been shown to produce positive outcomes.
For that reason, this manual bases smart growth upon the traditional mixed-use neighborhood. It was the abandonment of this model in favor of novelties that led to the current crises - ecological, economic, and social - that make the smart growth campaign necessary. There may be other, more creative ways to reorganize our national landscape, and many of these may be sustainable, but the neighborhood is the only one that has proved itself so, ten thousand times over.
The central importance of the neighborhood structure can be deduced by studying Miami-Dade County, the crucible in which many of this manual's ideas were forged. The Miami metropolitan area achieved very early almost all the features that have come to be identified with smart growth: a unified regional government and single school district; an elevated rail system supplemented by a pervasive bus network and a downtown people mover; an extremely dense settlement pattern; and a tightly drawn urban growth boundary - one of the nation's first. Yet, it is a place in which almost everyone drives to almost every destination. This outcome is due, plain and simple, to the absence of neighborhood structure. Without tight networks of walkable streets centered on mixed-use neighborhood centers, the residents of Miami will not walk to or from transit, however nice the weather.
Given glamorous newer developments such as green building and low-impact stormwater facilities, it is easy to forget that the old, dependable neighborhood structure is the very heart of smart growth. Its details are missing from most books on the subject, and they are not sufficiently emphasized in the LEED standards. Restoring the centrality of the neighborhood structure to the American environmental movement would be the most important contribution of this manual.
Also unconventional is this manual's emphasis on the details of physical design, particularly at the scale of the streetscape and the individual building. These issues are rarely addressed with specificity in the smart growth discussion. They, too, deserve attention, because all scales are connected. For example, window mullions increase visual privacy for interiors, allowing dwellings to be closer together. This increases density and creates more spatially intimate streets that encourage walking. Walking supports transit and reduces vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In turn, reduced VMT lowers carbon-based emissions and therefore slows climate change. To the infinitely complex human - particularly the demanding North American version - even mullions matter.
While many people are talking about smart growth; only a few are implementing it. But, after more than 25 years of efforts, it is now possible to reach conclusions about what works. The techniques described here are known to make a difference. They are offered with the confidence that if disseminated widely they can dramatically improve the state of our environment and the quality of our lives.
This manual is riot about the idiocy of suburban sprawl or the superiority of smart growth That subject is well covered by a library of publications - some of them our own - that first hit the shelves almost as soon as sprawl hit the ground. If you are looking for arguments against the current pattern of development, books such as Suburban Nation and The Long Emergency are readily available. It is our assumption that if you are reading this manual you do not need convincing. Rather you need resources and practical explanations about what to do.
It has been a struggle to relearn the full range of techniques surrounding good neighborhood design but the last decades have witnessed great progress toward this essential goal. We hope that this manual gets us there sooner.
About the Authors
Andres Duany FAIA CNU (Miami, FL) is a founding principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ). DPZ is a leader of the New Urbanism, an international movement that seeks to end suburban sprawl and urban disinvestment. Since 1980, DPZ has designed over 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization projects. Duany is cofounder of the Congress for New Urbanism and the recipient of several honorary doctorates and awards, including the National Building Museum's Vincent J. Scully Prize and the Richard H. Driehaus Prize. With Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck, he is co-author of Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.
Jeff Speck AICP CNU LEED-AP Hon. ASLA (Washington, DC) spent 10 years as director of town planning at DPZ, where he led or managed more than 40 of the firm's projects. Subsequent to the publication of Suburban Nation, he was appointed director of design at the National Endowment for the Arts, where he created the Governors' Institute on Community Design, a program that brings smart growth techniques to state leadership. After four years at the Endowment, he founded Speck & Associates, a design consultancy serving public officials and the real estate industry. He is a contributing editor to Metropolis magazine.
Mike Lydon CNU (New York, NY) is an urban planner, writer, and livable streets activist. Before founding The Street Plans Collaborative, an urban planning firm specializing in alternative transportation and the public realm, he worked for DPZ, the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, and Smart Growth Vermont. He is currently a Next American City Urban Vanguard and serves as a board member for the Miami Bicycle Coalition.
Table of Contents
Introduction. Part 1: The Region. Chapter 1: Regional Principles. Chapter 2: The Regional Plan. Chapter 3: Regional Transportation. Part 2: The Neighborhood. Chapter 4: Natural Context. Chapter 5: Neighborhood Components. Chapter 6: Neighborhood Structure. Part 3: The Street. Chapter 7: Thoroughfare Network. Chapter 8: Thoroughfare Design. Chapter 9: Public Streetscape. Chapter 10: Private Streetscape. Chapter 11: Parking. Part 4: The Building. Chapter 12: Building Types. Chapter 13: Green Construction. Chapter 14: Architectural Design. Appendix (Useful Statements; Smart Growth Directory; Acknowledgments; Image Credits). Index.
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