A great new book was just published by Christopher B. Leinberger called “The Option of Urbanism:  Investing in a New American Dream“.  Mr. Leinberger lays out a compelling case for how urbanism will triumph over sub-urbanism.  Some of his finest points speak to how government policy has pushed the country to where we stand now:  unabaited suburban sprawl, an expensive to maintain road system, an underfunded mass transit infrastructure and more investment in the deprecriating asset that is the automobile.

Anyway, the book is great.

Below is an article in the Hyde Park Herald about our involvement with the potential redevelopment of Harper Court. We are very encouraged by the support our plans have received. We look forward to continuing the ongoing dialogue.

Front Page

Second Page

http://www.hpherald.com/index.html

Romero Cook Design Studio has been working with Hyde Park / Kenwood Community Council, as well as members of the community, to develop a alternative for what could happen in Harper Court. which is currently a under-utilized and ineffective space. Through a process of community input, including the 53rd Street Visioning Workshop, a design concept has been developed that is viable, innovative, and responsive to the needs of the greater community without sacrificing the character the context of surrounding area.

The incorporated principles of the plan are derived from a rigorous evaluation of successful places in the United States and abroad. In doing this, we extracted the qualities of these places and incorporated them into the plan. At the same time, we studied the qualities of the local architecture of Hyde Park and Chicago that are based on our climate, culture, and history. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel or create a folly as other approaches might try to do. We are using the principles of good urban design and building design to create a real place that will be timeless as well serve as a destination for people within the community to live, work, and shop.

We hope you enjoy what you see. Please feel free to comment below.

Existing Aerial:

Existing View, from south.

Existing View, from northwest

Proposed Site Plan:

Section through new plaza, looking south:

Section through new plaza, looking east:

Section through new plaza, looking north:

1.  Before World War II, urban planning was based on the pedestrian. Through logical planning based on the ideal that one can walk or take mass transit to any of his daily needs. Public investment in infrastructure was in the form of streetcars, subways, trains etc.

2.  After World War II, urban planning became based on the automobile. Government policy and racial undertone pushed the population out of the central city into the suburbs. The mixes of uses in the central city became segmented where people lived in one area, shopped in another, and worked in another. The car was required to travel these distances. Public investment, especially from the federal government, was devoted mainly to highways and roads.

3.  A new paradigm emerged called New Urbanism that sought to bring back the ideals of traditional urbanism.  When introduced, the environment was such that New Urbanism could not break into mainstream thinking in urban planning.  They found someone who saw the value and the Founders of this movement designed the now famous Seaside, Florida. New Urbanism is currently fighting to get past the impression that it is elitist and nostalgic. 

5.  Now, to get past that impression is to understand that traditional urbanism can fix existing downtowns and bring smart, dense development to the suburbs. Take the concepts of urbanism and apply them to these markets.

6.  How can these concepts be incorporated into the suburbs?  Changing the mindset of everyone involved.  Educating city leaders, civic leaders and residents, making them understand that if they keep embracing the suburban model, they will be passed by nearby cities who more proactively embrace traditional urban concepts.

7.  Who incorporates them?  It takes like-minded developers, planners, architects and receptive, educated city leaders.  Developers must use political will to make city leaders grasp that, in the long view, this is the way to plan their growth.

8.  A project in Naperville, Illinois is exactly an example of this urbanization of a suburb. The project’s aim is to add density and expand the existing vibrant, yet small downtown to include another district that includes great buildings on great streets and a plaza.  We met initial resistance from the establishment, but currently nearly all are convinced.  In the end, this project will be of great benefit to the community.

9.  A project in Northern Indiana is an example of an infill project that turned momentum for a depressed downtown.  The City had plans to demolish this block of historic buildings to make way for new development.  Now, the buildings are being adapted to new uses and starting to bring people back to the Downtown. 

As suburban sprawl carves its path through our nation’s heartland, homes are getting bigger and bigger. For some reason, everyone needs a couple extra bedrooms, workout room, wine cellar, media room, snore room, great room, and a study. Since the dawn of habitas, humans have loved to show off their homes and features within. This seemingly innocent, if slightly prideful condition has turned into a free-for-all of excess.

But what does it all get you? In most houses equipped with all the aforementioned rooms, families hardly ever use all the rooms. No matter how many rooms you have, people tend to gather either in the kitchen, or close to it. The kitchen is the warmest room in the house and people gravitate toward it.

Homes built before the housing boom after World War II held far fewer rooms than homes built now. Space was at a premium, not just inside but outside as well. Would you rather a neighborhood with large sprawling, character-less houses on large lots with no trees? Or a neighborhood with an intelligent integration of parks and greens, with houses full of character designed for everyday, practical needs?

We should become better observers in weighing the media room against leaving the world a better place for our children who grow up in these houses. This is a crucial time for the envionment and how humans are affecting it negatively. Every extra square foot that we think we need included in our house is that much more we have to heat, air-condition, etc. The most ethical and moral decision might be to do our small part in designing and wanting homes that are efficiently laid out and can be maintained in an effificent manner.

We might not be able to watch movies upstairs above the garage in theatre seats, but they make movie theatres for that experience.

In cities such as Houston, Chicago and Los Angeles suburban sprawl forces people to live further and further from the city center. This sprawl forces people to drive long distances to their jobs, increasing traffic and greenhouse gas pollution. It also does not help those people feel happy to be in their cars for so long each day.

Good urban planning, attractive architecture and traditional city design helps people feel more comfortable living in the city center. When people feel comfortable living in cities, they live in dense enough populations that environment-friendly institutions such as public transit can flourish. When people live near where they work, they don’t have to drive, or drive as far as they would if they lived in the suburbs.

Good urban planning can therefore help us help ourselves. Housing types such as wall-sharing townhouses conserve energy because houses lose less heat and cool through their walls into the outside spaces. When houses share walls they in effect share heating and cooling expenditures, they don’t lose heat into the outside air.

Traditional neighborhood development and urban design advocates mixed use development, which combines residential and retail space in close proximity. This proximity, like people living near where they work, also cuts down on fossil fuel use and greenhouse gases. When someone doesn’t have to drive to the store to pick up groceries, or shop for whatever they need, without driving, it cuts down on exhaust and fuel use.

Finally, good urban design makes people happier and more able to live long and healthy lives. Living in dense urban areas encourages walking, which has obvious health benefits, as well as mental benefits. When people are out walking on the streets, sitting on their porches or enjoying public parks, it encourages socialization, getting to know ones neighbors and keeps the streets safe for everyone.

We have asked permission from our friend and colleague, Russell Preston,
to publish a lecture he has written on Urbanism.

“Where appropriate, new development contiguous to urban boundaries
should be organized as neighborhoods and districts, and be integrated with
the existing urban pattern. Noncontiguous development should be organized
as towns and villages with their own urban edges, and planned for a jobs/
housing balance, not as bedroom suburbs.” –Charter for the New Urbanism

A coral reef has a balanced structure of plants and animals interacting for
food, shelter and the needs for daily life. The reef requires many items such as sunlight, pleasing temperatures and care given by the inhabitants. The
reef provides an arena of life giving elements to be exchanged. At what
point does a place become a neighborhood? Complex elements must come
together to create a condition where a reef may prosper and create a home.
To re-examine where humans reside, ideally the neighborhood, we might
wonder if a level of complexity must be reached for these places to be
considered true human habitats? Just as the reef and it’s schools of fish, we
require a certain set of conditions to be present in order to consider a place
a true neighborhood in balance with nature. Living Urbanism is the fullest
realization of this principle and in-turn the creation of real neighborhoods.

Are our projects too thinly settled? Are we planning for complete villages
and towns? If we are to create places that support “jobs & housing
balance”i we must be able to build the dense urbanism required by the
economy of a neighborhood. We must implement solutions to the
urbanization of the suburbs where in these plans truly bring together all
those items needed to support life within walking distance.

Shall we continue to suggest a neighborhood is the fundamental unit of
human habitat, a unit that is sustaining and that supplies, at minimum, the
daily needs of contemporary life without the convenient automobile? We
should be achieving more than the minimum needs. Our projects should
create abundance and enhance the locale. All complex aspects of the
human habitat: social, cultural, economic, academic and environmental,
must come together to create Living Urbanism… urbanism where we shall
not have to worry about the effects on future generations.

Context sensitive design is used throughout our practice. However, we must evaluate what context we are being sensitive to and whether deference to
that context is hindering our ability to produce urbanism. The E.P.A.
believes 1/3 of all Americans will soon prefer to live in walkable
neighborhoods.ii We will continuously be faced with the demand for
urbanism in a suburban context. How shall we create the density essential
to providing a set of daily services within walking distance if this demands
an urbanism that, by design, could be too far out of context within the
existing condition?

It is time to stop producing only bedroom communities, even within the New Urbanism. The green movement is setting levels of expectations in America regarding the quality of our built environment. The appeal for
neighborhoods has now become the domain of the environmentalist. LEED-
ND states that credit will be given for proximity to a diversity of uses.iii The list describes what is needed to sustain daily life outside the automobile (a
bank, dry cleaner, restaurant, school, etc.) But these uses are dependent on
economic realities related to the population of a project and its’ immediate
surroundings. We must respect this if we are to truly create functioning
neighborhoods. The greening of America presents us with an opportunity to educate the populous about the fundamental minimum size of a
neighborhood.

We are creating community. Yet we must acknowledge a fundamental
difference between a community and a neighborhood. A community can
exist within a single home, between several families, across several streets
or even as a group of like-minded individuals linked via Myspace. This
flexibility in scale is different than that of the neighborhood. Community can exist in these many forms due to the ability for those included to
communicate frequently and exchange knowledge. The letter, the telegraph, the cell phone have all led to an increased idea and geography of what
community can be to an individual. Neighborhoods however have a finite
size.

The different relationship each possesses with the physical world suggests a community can exist without a neighborhood. This difference creates two
sets of principles that govern the design of a community and that of a
neighborhood. One set is linked to geography and the physical relationships of objects in space, the neighborhood, and the other is linked to the
organization of individuals and their communication of knowledge.
Understanding the differences between what creates community and what
creates neighborhood is pinnacle to the success of our plans. Creating
places of a scale without the ability to support the creation of a true
neighborhood is un-natural. We can live without community, however it
may be a life less fulfilling, but we cannot, naturally, live without a
neighborhood. Embedded in these two sets of principles is Living
Urbanism… urbanism in balance with our physical limits and needs as
humans.

How often are we able to plan for a population within a new pedestrian
quarter that is of the size needed to establish the economy of a
neighborhood? Are we too comfortable planning in the 3rd transect zone? I
propose we are, and if we are to aspire to create Living Urbanism the
default transect zone cannot be the 3rd. The sweet spot along the Transect
is in the 4th and 5th zones. It is with these classes of the built environment
that people can be organized to form a whole neighborhood. This suggests
that the Transect has two classes of zones, those that are foundational for
the creation of livable places composed of neighborhoods and those that
are not.

The Transect only explains and gives us a way of speaking about the built
environment. We need to understand how well a neighborhood functions, or provides life by foot to be possible. The people inhabiting these places must be foremost on our minds. Can one wake in the morning, pick up a paper at the corner-store, enjoy a coffee at the café, walk to the trolley for a ride to
work and grab some food on the way home? We must ensure one’s core
sets of actions are possible. There is a spectrum of human existence with
the fully auto oriented sprawl on the bottom and the most complex and
metropolitan of urbanism on the top. At the middle is a place where all ones daily needs can be gathered by foot. It is at this point where Living
Urbanism begins and we must strive to create places that reach this level of
human existence.

This will be a challenge, but we must progress our craft, science and art.
How will we confront the issues of context relating to the sprawling
suburbs? How will we provide for an ever-increasing number of people
looking for places with the benefits of urbanism to live? Do we as modern
humans have the ability to be both stewards of the land and the street? Will
we be able to define, both horizontally and vertically, a balanced type of
growth for our built environment that will ensure our future generations
enjoyment of the planet? Do we truly understand what is needed to craft
places that are not only walkable, but livable as well?

“Organized as neighborhoods”iv suggests that we plan in complete wholes…a place filled with commerce, jobs, art, children, hopes and dreams. We can
no longer afford to brush the surface. We plan in 5-minute walks, but the
car and the developer-run corner store are all too often ubiquitous. We must strive to build the framework for natural neighborhoods to prosper. With the greening of America upon us, it is our time to fully commit to this principle
of neighborhood creation. We must no longer compromise on the balanced
complexity required for Living Urbanism to flourish.

i Charter of the New Urbanism.
ii U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “White Paper: The Market for Smart
Growth.” Gregg Logan, Robert Charles Lesser & Co. 2007.
iii U.S. Green Building Council, “LEED for Neighborhood Development Rating
System: Pilot Version”. 2007.
iv Charter of the New Urbanism.

At some point in the near future, the sprawl of car-based development will have to stop as the world confronts rising gas prices and rising infrastructure costs. This is a study to redevelop two existing suburban shopping centers into a mixed use neighborhood, while still maintaining part of the existing shopping center.

All information based on four story buildings consisting of mixed use, townhouse, or condo functions with three interior block parking decks located within the new neighborhood. Within this new neighborhood, one has access to a wide variety of daily amenities, including a large scale grocery store, a cleaners, a hardware store, etc.

For more information and images, click here

Existing Aerial Photo

Existing Nolli Plan

Proposed Nolli Plan

Proposed Site Plan, Rendered

Neighborhoods can be planned to make it possible to walk to any everyday destination within a fifteen-minute walk. This proximity of amenities is achieved by incorporating zoning that requires a certain density with mixed uses. The availability of public transportation is key to creating cities with great pedestrian-based neighborhoods. If public transportation is available, people will then be able to utilize public transportation to go to work in the larger commercial center or to another destination in the city.

In general, pedestrian-based neighborhoods are able to provide a full range of services in a relatively small area, thus creating more space for more-defined green areas of nature. Large cities can be made up of several neighborhoods, or “nodes”, that are all comprehensively planned out.

Chicago is a great example of this: a large city with many pedestrian-based neighborhoods with large reliance on public transportation. You can go to most everywhere in Chicago via public transportation. Today’s continued success of the original Chicago urban plan is a testament to the logic of pedestrian-based planning.

Automobile-based city planning is based on the principle that since we have cars, and people enjoy having cars, we should create cities that utilize them. In area with this sort of planning, there are strict single-use zoning requirements, which stemmed from an overreaction from wanting residential uses separated from industrial uses. While this is a worthy goal, we are not in the Industrial Revolution anymore.

This creates distance from residential areas of the city to the commercial areas of the city. Distance mandates the use of a car, and with more cars comes more congestion. The solution to this problem, unfortunately, is to add more highways. Many cities, including Boston and Milwaukee, are bucking this false solution to traffic congestion by actually tearing down highways.

Along with the single-use zoning requirements, there are also strict parking requirements for commercial uses. This stems from the planning put forth is designed for the car, not the human. Because of these requirements, land gets eaten up with no reasonable means to control it. Because this type of planning is not “node-based”, with no defined edge, nature is disregarded.

What this planning says is that everyone has a right to a car, which is the prevailing thought of everyone who HAS a car. Everyone is affected by city planning, but not everyone can afford to buy a car. This creates a situation where the “have-nots” are given a further disadvantage. We were given feet at birth, but not everyone is given a car on their sixteenth birthday.

In the long history of the Olympic Games, cities have transformed themselves to put on the world’s largest sporting event. While the Games last two weeks, these transformations last for decades. Often times, specifically in the 20th century, what is left of the built environment designed and constructed for the Olympics does not maintain its luster. It is a vexing problem: how do you create something that is to thrill for two weeks and then be adapted for a hundred years?

Chicago has an opportunity to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Many observers in the city have seen as a chance for Chicago to become a true “world city”. How can the urban planning and architecture that serves for the Games be adapted to what Chicagoans will live with for a hundred years?

First, the planning must be in keeping with what has been successful thus far. Time-tested traditions of pedestrian-based neighborhoods with solid density will not just serve as infrastructure for the Olympics, but for the city for decades. Chicago’s numerous neighborhoods, planned in the 19th century, continue to provide everything its residents need day-to-day. Also, the Olympics are a great opportunity to solve the ever-present problem of a lack of variety in housing. Chicago has a great opportunity in having an extraordinary amount of open space / vacant land in the city limits. Creating a more suburban environment, (car based), with this land would be a disservice to the history of the city. Just because we have more the space does not mean we should not build dense, pedestrian based neighborhoods in which its habitants can enjoy streets, gardens, and parks.

Second, the architecture of the Olympic Village must have a sense of permanence and sustainability. For every successful Olympic Village, there is one that after a few short years looks outdated and irrelevant. The architecture should reflect the great tradition of building we have in Chicago. To turn our backs to over a hundred years of tradition by designing trendy architecture would be a disservice to our strong tradition of architecture.

In the planning, we must take into consideration all income types in designing the Olympic Village. The Games are about amateurs, and to create something that is only for the wealthy would be against the basic philosophy of the Games. Creating accessible architecture would create a sense of community that the Games are all about.

In the 20th century, Chicago’s urban planning was defined by the failed experiment of large-scale public housing projects. Now is the time to learn from our mistakes, not be taken by trendy planning ideas, and create sustainable development that will both inspire for the Olympics and last for a hundred years.