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

de
facto
town center. This is fair criticism. It’s a fact of
development economics that the extra costs and
complexity of creating a true mixed-use center of this
type can most easily be justified in an area of high
demographics and above average disposable personal
income. However, this argument can easily be over-
stated. The construction cost of Birkdale Village
averaged out to $75 per square foot (approximately
£450 per square meter). Given the lower land costs
for the smaller area required for this more compact
development compared to a conventional develop-
ment that would need a larger site to lay out all
the components in separate pods, this is not an
extravagant figure.
However, building the project is not the most dif-
ficult issue. Developers need the reassurance of ele-
vated demographics and consumers with high
disposable incomes to support the development risk,
and to create this type of development in less wealthy
locations requires some kind of public subsidy for the
private development to defray costs, such as land
acquisition. The market alone cannot provide this
new urbanity for the working class and other, poorer
sections of society unless it is part of a larger, pub-
lic–private venture that tackles social equity and
justice in the city. Every sector of the population
deserves access to this improved urban future, not
just the wealthy bourgeoisie, however important they
may be in the process. This real problem of exclusion
gives ammunition to the critics who complain that
this is a stage set of Main Street, and makes a carnival
experience of what should be the substance of
everyday life. They argue that people are unaware
how their public life has an unreal, sanitized and
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM
91
Walters_04.qxd 2/26/04 7:17 PM Page 91

---

tranquilized quality. In these critics’ terms, the passive
café society has triumphed over an active urban
reality to the detriment of all concerned.
We acknowledge this argument, but we don’t quite
agree. In an American suburban culture where real
urbanity is not something many citizens have experi-
enced, Birkdale’s Main Street ambience is a novel
condition. The development’s truly public spaces, the
unusual suburban presence of people living and
working above the shops – sharing in the public
realm of the street from their private balconies and
open windows – is the nearest thing to city life that
many people have ever experienced. It’s imperfect,
but it’s a start. Surveys and empirical observations
clearly show that Americans are hungry for an urban
experience, and we believe it’s very possible for a sub-
stantial number of Americans to grow into this
lifestyle, and to gradually learn what it means to be
urban dweller, a 
flaneur
. If you go to Birkdale on a
Friday or Saturday night you’ll see plenty of genuine
street life and urban activity. These people are not
aware of some distant academic criticizing their
behavior. The folks illustrated in Plate 6 aren’t acting.
They’re 
being
.
Our opinion is not entirely objective. In the mid-
1990s the authors were instrumental in helping the
town of Huntersville rewrite its zoning ordinance to
ban conventional commercial strip development and
to curtail residential sprawl. We did this by mandat-
ing that commercial development should be mixed in
its uses and connected to adjacent residential devel-
opment, and by requiring all new residential develop-
ment to be laid out with a connecting network of
streets and public spaces. We used examples of tradi-
tional urban design as models, and wrote the code
around the attributes inherent in their design – good
proportions, contextual design, compatible mixtures
of uses and pedestrian-scaled townscapes which
retained the convenience of the car but reduced its
autonomy.
In short, high-density, mixed-use developments
like Birkdale, which meet all the requirements and
expectations of the code, are precisely what we had in
mind (see Plate 7). We would have preferred that
such a development of town center scale took place
in the real town center, but the realities of the market
and development economics made that impossible.
The old town center, such as it is, is a mile from
major highways with limited access and awkward
development potential due to a straggling and diverse
pattern of individual land ownership. It’s a devel-
oper’s nightmare with difficult and expensive land
acquisition combined with poor communications
and limited visibility to passing traffic. When com-
pared to a site near a busy freeway intersection, there
is no contest.
In circumstances like this it’s the urban designer’s
job to deal with reality and make the best places pos-
sible. It is important, we believe, not to make the
quest for perfection the enemy of good design. By
holding out for utopia, the urban designer runs the
risk of being marginalized and neutered. We are
proud of our small part in creating the Birkdale
development. It’s not easy to build things of higher
quality on either side of the Atlantic but now that
developments like Birkdale are a physical reality in
America, we can put them to good purpose. We can
educate the public and the development community
about good urban design and, importantly, the
economic practicality of creating high quality urban
environments as opposed to the generic world of sub-
urban dross.
But not all the action is in the American ‘burbs’.
Affluent populations from the outer and middle
suburbs are returning to the city center and inner
suburbs. With the departure of manufacturing and
industry from the inner city, former industrial build-
ings become available for conversion to middle and
upper income housing, and where old buildings are
in short supply, developers eagerly manufacture new
ones that look old to meet the need without a trace of
irony (see Figure 4.19).
The rising affluence of the inner city forces out or
marginalizes lower income groups, who are increas-
ingly displaced by the middle class unless local
governments intervene in the marketplace to provide
affordable housing. Most service sector downtowns
still provide job opportunities for lower paid workers –
in the form of security staff, janitors, waiters, sales
assistants and so forth. But the market provides very
little in the way of housing for these workers, or
indeed for the lower ranks of professional such as
teachers and nurses and valued public safety employ-
ees like policemen and firemen.
One successful federal initiative in America to
reduce this problem has been the HOPE VI pro-
gram, whereby derelict public housing is demolished
and replaced by better-designed homes in a mixture
of subsidized public housing and affordable market
rate dwellings. The urban and architectural design
philosophy of HOPE VI has mirrored that of New
Urbanism: to integrate different types of housing
together in the same community, socially and visu-
ally, so that it is impossible to tell which housing is
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
92
Walters_04.qxd 2/26/04 7:17 PM Page 92

---

of which type. Charlotte has one such successful
development in its downtown area, First Ward Place
just two blocks from the new light rail line through
the city center (see Figure 2.14). There is only one
problem with this good development. It’s a drop in
the ocean. Charlotte, like many American cities, has
a crisis of insufficient affordable housing. First Ward
Place needs to be multiplied all over the city on sites
adjacent to public transit, job opportunities and ser-
vices. This kind of development needs to be an inte-
gral part of the future urban villages envisaged at key
nodes along the transit lines. Local authorities need
to mandate the inclusions of affordable dwellings in
every major development, as is required by the zon-
ing ordinance of Davidson, North Carolina.
When affordable housing is minimal or absent
from the city center altogether, the revitalized center
city does become no more than the playground for
the affluent classes. When this situation is combined
with the economic exclusivity of suburban centers
like Birkdale Village, American society is presented
with a challenge of major proportions. The public
spaces of cities are the only places where citizens
encounter people who are different from themselves,
but which some people may find daunting. Meeting
strangers can be scary to a lot of people but the
process is important in creating a civilized society
(Sennett, 1973, 1994).
When we go out in public and encounter only
people like ourselves, we are impoverished, and, most
worryingly, our public life is being tranquillized. All
the rough edges, odd or idiosyncratic behavior,
unique individuals, any distractions that might dis-
turb our consumption at the corporate stores, are
being smoothed off and edited out, banished to parts
of the city we never see. In this invidious manner we
surrender our grip on the messy complex reality of
city life and slip uncomplainingly into the velvet
glove of a convenient simulacrum. The urban
designer is in the thick of this debate. It’s difficult. 
It’s awkward. It gets confusing. But there’s no other
place to be.
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM