going to a meeting in the office or visiting friends. The
potential availability of finding on-street parking in a
development is a vital psychological factor in the suc-
cess of street level retail space. All drivers hope that they
are going to be lucky and slip into a spot just as it opens
up. For the majority who are unsuccessful in this quest,
off-street parking must be immediately and easily acces-
sible from the street but at the same time screened by
buildings (see Figure 10.12). Nothing harms pedestrian
street life more than having to walk directly past large
parking lots or parking decks. Car parks and parking
decks should ideally be placed in the interior of the
block, but if a deck has a street frontage, the ground
level should include retail or office spaces to promote
pedestrian use. Any street façade of a parking deck
should always be clad in high quality materials and
given some proportional articulation – usually vertical
bays – to fit into the rhythm of the streetscape (see
Figure 6.34).
While designing for adequate and convenient
parking is an almost universal preoccupation, it’s no
exaggeration to say that in America, the parking
provision drives the design. The other complication
is the cost of parking structures. In American terms, a
surface level parking space costs about $1000–$1500
at 2003 prices. The equivalent space in a deck costs
between $10 000 and 15 000, and in an under-
ground structure over $20 000. These costs provide
another reason to reduce parking areas by sharing
spaces between uses. Ideally, customers or workers
should arrive by car, park once, and then be able to
reach their other destinations in the area on foot or
by transit within a walkable, mixed-use environment.
In this way, separate parking spaces for each different
use are replaced by one or two centralized facilities.
Even with these economies, parking costs are hard
for most developments to bear, and the development
economics of high-density, mixed-use infill schemes
are often balanced on a knife-edge if there is no pub-
lic financing as part of the deal. The climate of
American political and public opinion often makes it
difficult for a city to inject public tax dollars into a
development project for facilities such as parking
structures. This is often viewed by politicians and the
public as an unnecessary subsidy to private compa-
nies, and a negative sign that ‘the market’ won’t sup-
port such a development in its ‘pure,’ private form.
Public funding of major downtown developments
such as sports stadiums and museums is increasingly
common in American cities, but these blockbuster
projects often have more to do with a city’s image-
making agenda rather than a truly Smart Growth
vision. There is some residual reluctance on the part
of many US cities to initiate or partner in more pro-
gressive development, such as high-density mixed-
use developments – despite the desire of
forward-looking sectors of the private development
industry for such partnerships. This hesitancy means
that American cities are not as proactive as their
European counterparts in directing growth in ways
that suit their long-term interests, preferring to allow
city form to follow market forces. This factor, and its
consequent result of
ad hoc
sprawl, remain two of
the more structural differences between American
and European urbanism.
In this confusing and fluctuating American politi-
cal context, the opportunities for design and plan-
ning professionals to have profound influence on the
form of communities are limited. For this reason it’s
all the more important to pursue Smart Growth
objectives with a sharpened sense of urban design
that can promote three-dimensional thinking. Just as
important as these objectives are the means of achiev-
ing them, and in practice we have found the charrette
process by far the best method of providing a vigor-
ous democratic forum for the production of detailed
master plans and implementation strategies. There-
fore, before presenting the case studies, we describe
the concept of the urban design master plan and our
charrette process in some detail.
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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