Design First Walters fm qxd 2/26/04 7: 50 pm page I

partly a victory for the powerful countryside lobby
in the UK, and the policy helps to assuage deep
resentment by rural communities at the thought of
newcomers encroaching on their countryside
amenities and way of life.
In practice, the British Labour government has
backtracked on some of its goals for sustainable urban
growth, simply because there were not enough brown-
field sites available to handle the population explosion,
estimated in 1996 at an extra 4.4 million households
in England over a 25 year period (Hall, 2002: p 418).
New expansions of urban areas are accordingly
planned around London and in the south-east of the
country, where the situation is most acute. A govern-
ment statement in February 2003 specified extensions
to the city of Milton Keynes (300 000 new homes),
development along the corridor of the M11 motorway
between London and Cambridge (250 000–500 000
new homes) and 70 000 new homes in the county of
Kent, including the Thames Gateway project, a
50-mile development corridor along the River Thames
related to the Channel Tunnel high-speed rail link
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk-news/england/
2727399.stm).
Despite these compromises, the British govern-
ment’s overall policy for more sustainable urban form
retains the concept of higher density, active urban
places, with more house types that suit the multitude
of smaller, childless households in the population
projections. American readers will note the great dif-
ference to their country: British government agencies
act strategically in the long-term interest of the com-
munity as a whole, as opposed to the American sys-
tem of allowing the ‘free’ market, acting for the
short-term profit of a few, to establish where and
when this new development will take place. In
America, the biggest environmental challenge is the
hurdle of creating national or regional policies for
sustainable growth that are enforceable, and not just
a wish list of concepts with no mechanisms for
implementing them. Such a regulatory framework is
a concept that flies in the face of profound cultural
beliefs about the sanctity of private property rights,
and few people in America believe it’s even a remote
possibility. Moves in a few states, like New Jersey and
Maryland to support growth with public resources in
existing urban areas rather than greenfield sites are
good steps in this direction, but even these policies
can’t stop development in places that may cause harm
to a community’s long-term environmental and cul-
tural sustainability.
The second most difficult design and development
challenge for America’s urban areas is to find a way
that the new and reviving urban villages do not
become isolated middle-class playgrounds supporting
a lifestyle unavailable to the poorer sections of society.
This is a very real problem in a market-driven
CHAPTER SIX
●
URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD
129
Walters_06.qxd 2/26/04 7:24 PM Page 129

---

development process, where the lower economic
potential of poorer communities cannot provide the
return on investment most developers desire in their
financial equations for higher-density mixed-use
urban villages. This effectively puts whole sections of
cities off-limits to this kind of development, and even
when poorer communities have the infrastructure
(albeit decayed) and are in a good location near the
city center, new development in their neighborhoods
tend to displace low wage earners and renters.
These are the people who have to move as property
is purchased house by house by middle-class gentri-
fiers, or by developers who are scooping out territory
ahead of the market mainstream. It doesn’t take large-
scale development projects to cause this exodus.
Overall, the city benefits by this process of gentrifica-
tion, but without social policies and financial subsi-
dies that support enough existing residents to stay in
place and benefit from the improvements in their
neighborhoods, poorer working-class areas will sim-
ply transform into tomorrow’s cool new venues for
the bourgeoisie. This gentrification has a lot of ben-
efits, but this urban improvement shouldn’t come at
the expense of the urban poor.
This issue of social equity applies to new develop-
ments as well. Few local governments in America prac-
tice what is called ‘inclusionary zoning,’ whereby a
certain proportion of units in a new housing develop-
ment are ‘set aside’ as affordable for lower income home
buyers. American conservatives oppose this concept as
yet another instance of social engineering and interfer-
ence by government in private development. It takes a
brave and progressive local government to enact and
carry through such a policy, to ensure that a wider range
of income groups shares the benefits of growth and well-
designed new neighborhoods. One such American
town is Davidson, North Carolina, where the zoning
ordinance requires 12.5 percent of all new dwellings to
be affordable to individuals and families earning only
60–80 percent of the national median income.
In our work with towns and cities in North and
South Carolina, we try wherever possible to bring
good design within reach of all sections of those com-
munities. There is no national or state policy to bring
this about, so it happens only as a result of detailed
work with each community, incorporating the ‘set
aside’ provisions for affordable housing in the zoning
code and establishing uniform design guidelines so
that lower-cost homes share the design and aesthetic
character of their more expensive counterparts. We
worked with the town of Davidson on its progressive
zoning ordinance, and with the City of Greenville,
S.C., to upgrade a run-down and poor, African-
American neighborhood south of downtown without
displacing existing residents. This latter project forms
the case study examined in Chapter 10. These are suc-
cessful projects, but they need to be emulated (and
improved upon) in towns and cities all across America.