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parts of towns and cities (see Figure 6.32). Two cities,
London and Oslo, now charge motorists for using
the streets of the city center, a controversial practice
that has worked far better than expected to reduce
congestion. But in America the car still rules, and all
urban design is constrained by designing facilities for
accommodating the private automobile. This means
designing the parking so that it is convenient but
unobtrusive.
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
140
Figure 6.30
Eleventh Street, Atlanta, Georgia. Within
the constraints of cheap modern construction, the
new apartments on the left use projecting
entrances, balconies, cornice lines and roof
overhangs to harmonize with the bold architecture
of the 1920s apartments on the right-hand side of
the street.
Figure 6.31
Gateway Village, Charlotte, NC, Duda
Paine, architects, 2001, detail. The façade of this
large office building is enriched by the subtle details
of the brick and tile cladding, where small
projections and recessions combine with changes of
material to break down the surface into a complex
grid of regulating lines.
Figure 6.29
Nineteenth-century terrace in
Belgravia, London. This view illustrates the power of
repetition. Flat façades, so typical of nineteenth-
century developers’ architecture, reduce
construction costs, but their potential boredom is
relieved by the bold projection of entrance 
porches. Although identical, their vertical rhythms
satisfy the eye and break the terrace down into
identifiable units.
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There are two types of car parking – on-street and
on site. From the 1950s through the 1980s, most
American design and planning practice was based on
two objectives: eliminating on-street parking as an
impediment to free-flowing traffic, and creating of
large car parks in front of buildings to maximize cus-
tomer convenience. Parking lots were hugely over-
sized for the convenience of one-time Christmas
crowds; no consideration was given to the aesthetic
effects of these huge areas of asphalt, or to their envi-
ronmental consequences of polluted surface water
run-off into streams, or of their complete obliteration
of any environmental qualities that were pleasant to
the pedestrian (see Figure 6.33).
It wasn’t until the 1990s that New Urbanism
offered Americans the opportunity to relearn what
most Europeans in their older, more compact cities
never quite forgot (although there are plenty of cases
in Britain and elsewhere of selective amnesia, where
car-dominated planning oppresses the pedestrian).
The best urban places are structured around human
beings, not their cars, and while vehicle access and
parking should be ample and convenient, the most
attractive and prosperous places in urban America are
now those where cars on site are subservient to pedes-
trians. Car parking is still an essential component
however; only in the densest of American cities like
Boston and New York where there is good public
transit, is it feasible to build developments without
integral parking. Elsewhere, in lower density cities,
we are always working out the car parking plan while
pursuing our townscape aims and larger urban design
objectives for any particular development.
In conventional suburbia, each separate use
requires its own parking provision. When driving
and parking patterns are analyzed, figures show it
takes five parking spaces to accommodate each vehicle
in a community on a daily basis. There is one at
home, one at work, and three others scattered around
at stores, health clubs, at the doctor’s office, parks,
schools, churches and so forth. This means that each
car requires 1600 square feet (148.6 square meters) of
concrete or asphalt just for parking (Schmitz: p. 18).
It is imperative to reduce this figure, by sharing park-
ing between uses, by linking parking lots within the
block for easier access, and by providing on-street
parking.
We try to provide on-street parking in every possible
location. This doesn’t do a whole lot to solve the numer-
ical problems of the parking requirements, but cars
parked along streets provide protection for the pedes-
trian from moving traffic. They slow down the speed of
vehicles and, importantly, they signify activity. People
are parked there for a reason, popping into to the store,
CHAPTER SIX
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URBAN DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD