What some pro-densification readers have probably taken the most offense at was my reference to yards and cul-de-sacs. But, actually, these concepts of safe, kid-friendly, outdoor play spaces are not antithetical to living in a dense urban area.
One of my main purposes in creating this blog has been to call out examples from around the world where cities are successfully providing opportunities for families to live in denser housing with the amenities that these commenters have characterized as "suburban."
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| Courtyard housing in Zurich |
For example, let's take yards. I have written several blog posts about housing designs from around the world, such as row houses and courtyard housing, that provide denser urban housing AND access to yards for children. For example, here is a picture from a post I wrote in 2012 about courtyard housing in Zurich. My sister-in-law used to live in this particular housing development, which provided a huge shared yard where kids (and adults) could safely play. In Los Angeles, these complexes are called garden courts.
Vancouver, which has one of the densest downtowns in North America, requires that 25% of units be designed and sold/rented to families with children. As a result, throughout downtown Vancouver you can find housing towers surrounded by wrap-around, three-story townhouse units with access to secure playground yards for children. (Through my service on the Downtown Commission, I recently advocated for Austin to adopt a first-step, scaled-down version of this policy for downtown by giving density bonuses to developers who include small outdoor play areas for children. The Commission unanimously voted for the policy, which the Austin City Council approved on first reading last week. City staff is currently opposed to the proposal).
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| Vancouver |
In the same vein as Vancouver, Portland, Oregon's highly-dense Pearl District has a goal for 25% of the housing units to be family-friendly. In 2011, I visited one apartment complex there that has followed the courtyard concept, as well as other housing complexes that are directly adjacent to kid-friendly parks.
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| The Pearl District in Portland, Oregon |
As for safe streets where kids can throw a ball or ride their bikes, while admittedly cul-de-sacs are not ideal for a denser urban core, there are many models of streets in dense cities that facilitate kids' ability to play. The woonerfs in Denmark and Sweden are probably the most well-known model. In London, these are known as home zones and are being retrofitted throughout the city. In the U.S., these have been referred to as "shared streets" or "living streets." Here is a picture of a wonderful shared street my family visited in San Sebastian, Spain in 2012.
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| Shared Street in San Sebastian, Spain |
What worries me about the negative responses I have received to my previous post is that they may represent a more widely-shared expectation in our city: that we can only have a denser urban core if we sacrifice the things that many of us love most about our communities--such as yards, trees, and safe streets. My hope for CodeNext is that our city policymakers recognize that these family-friendly amenities are not only complementary but actually critical to creating a city that is robust, healthy, and sustainable for all types of households.
I appreciate your effort to find forms of architecture that are both dense and good places for children to play. As I'm sure you know, right now you couldn't build most of those kinds of architecture in Austin, especially not in the vast majority of the city that's zoned SF. I'd love to see more of them. I still don't like cul-de-sacs though! The flip side of creating streets that don't connect is putting lots of traffic on decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly and especially young pedestrian-unfriendly arterials. They also make cities hard to walk for children or adults by making walking paths much longer. I grew up in suburbia and walked everywhere and cul-de-sacs were the bane of my existence.
ReplyDeleteI would be happier if you used the term child-friendly rather than family-friendly. I have no children but am still part of a family. All the students at UT are somebody's child and most of them somebody's sibling, somebody's nephew, etc. I don't think you intend to *exclude* childless adults from a family by the terms you use, but I think it can have that effect. It would definitely make this childless adult feel better about what you're saying.
This is off the topic of your posts, but I'm curious about not just how to get more of what you want to see (grass, trees) for children, but how to handle those things you might not want to see. When the Little Woodrow's debate was up for Council, some of the debate had people saying that a bar near where they were raising their child was unacceptable. If setting up child-friendly facilities in a neighborhood means pressure to not have some things adults want, it's going to create pressure not to build child-friendly amenities.
Thanks again for your post!
It's true that the suburban model for a cul-de-sac is a problem for an urban area in terms of its lack of connectivity. But the pedestrian connectivity issues with cul-de-sacs can be easily be addressed by creating pedestrian cut-throughs. There have been lots of studies about the benefits of cul-de-sac-like infrastructure in dense urban areas for promoting street calming and social cohesion in a neighborhood. If anything, the denser a neighborhood is, the more important it is to have areas with traffic-calmed streets for children to play. Cul-de-sac-like streets can be found in many dense urban areas around the world, although they go by different names, such as courts and quadrangles. Before you forever shun cul-de-sacs, I recommend you read this great article on the topic: http://www.uctc.net/access/24/Access%2024%20-%2006%20-%20Reconsidering%20the%20Cul-de-sac.pdf
DeleteI'd kill to have a bar nearer to where I live with my 20 month old near MLK and Springdale...
DeleteNot that I think Mueller is the be-all end all of urban development, but it is undeniably kid-friendly compared to most Austin 'hoods that my wife and I could afford. We live about a mile east of the development. They don't have much in the way of yards, but the streets are calm w/good sidewalks, the park is right there, and some do have the kind of shared courtyard that you talk about here.
My wife and I totally envy a few friends of ours at the same daycare who live there - our street sounds in theory like a kid friendly place - big yards, sidewalk most of the way (although there are some breaks) and a street that leads into a n'hood. But it turns out, unless there's a park close enough to walk, or a trail, or a place to sit and have coffee or a beer, or even other kids nearby, its not that child-friendly. We end up driving to Mueller park areas when we take the kid somewhere.
I will confess to having a deep emotional response to cul-de-sacs that I may never get over! They symbolize a horrible kind of soul-sucking development in my mind. I think that cul-de-sacs, to me, are essentially a place to turn around cars. Squares, shared yards, shared streets, are something very different than cul-de-sacs in my view, or even the type of 'modified cul-de-sacs with pedestrian walkways' described in the article you linked Dan to.
ReplyDeleteI will also add that I really like the pictures here in your second post! Way more appealing, and quite different, than the pictures in your first post, for the most part. As Dan says above, most of this development cannot be built in the city today. I think my goal is to allow more of this type of development all over Austin - and not just on Burnet and Lamar.
One more remark about Vancouver... I'm not as much in love with the type of development pictured. I guess I'd have to see the 'secure playground yards,' but it sounds potentially kind of sterile. Which is also my hesitation with requiring developers to build play areas, or giving them more density for play areas... I'd rather them just be able to build densely regardless! Then I could get near the great green spaces that are already established.
One of my favorite child-friendly neighborhoods I've ever visited is Greenwich Village in New York (yeah, it's for rich kids, but still). Spent the morning there on a visit years ago and it was clearly a family gathering place and there were tons and tons of kids around. You don't need private green space to be kid-friendly; you don't need private space outside your apartment at all.
ReplyDeleteI tried to post this last night, but it didn't go through. Luckily I saved it.
ReplyDeleteHeather, I appreciate you responding to our comments.
While, I don’t think my family’s needs should be prioritized over other’s needs, I am a father of a 4, almost 5 year old boy, so I understand that families with children have different needs.
First, I think some of the frustration towards the post is the insinuation that there’s only one way to be a “real” family, and that is to own a home with yard, and we should calcify neighborhoods in that form regardless of changes in demand, demographics, etc. The reality is there are many different types of families with different needs, priorities and tastes. I personally rent a small house, and I’m very ambivalent about owning a house, again. Others might choose to live in apartment/condo for cost or convenience. I think it’s presumptuous to assume single family with a yard equals family friendly.
Second, the first post basically described Round Rock (not that there’s anything wrong with Round Rock), and said we should preserve “affordable” family friendly housing. Maybe I misinterpreted, but that sounded like you were advocating for the single family nature of certain urban core neighbors to never change. The second post showed examples of real urban development that I think the vast majority of urbanist would feel comfortable supporting, where I didn’t see a cul-de-sac or a private yard. Also, it is illegal to build those examples in the core neighborhoods and attempts to move in that direction have been met with significant resistance, and that resistance has sounded very much like the first post.
I am an urbanist, and I support pedestrian/bike/transit friendly dense infill, but I’m not anti-family or children. I’m not anti-green space. I think it’s vitally important, I just don’t think it has to be my private yard as some of your examples showed.
Thanks again for responding, have a good night.
Brad
I just want to say, I think the stuff in these pictures looks great! Let's change our zoning code and allow people to build like this all over the place, we'll have a gorgeous city with much more housing supply (making housing much more affordable for everyone).
ReplyDeleteIn my experience of living on one, cul-de-sacs are village-y and almost playground-like in and of themselves. They create a quiet, neighborly atmosphere. Our kids use the small, urban cul-de-sac we live on for biking, shooting hoops, and playing tag. I know of other urban cul-de-sac dwellers who sit out in lawn chairs as their kids run around, chatting and relaxing. I've certainly seen larger, suburban cul-de-sacs that feel hot, sterile and "made for cars," but I think this is an issue of design. The "soul sucking" quality you describe may be coming from the suburban setting including the size of the actual 'sac, over-wide streets, overlarge lawns, the less dense lots/huge houses that surround them, etc. — perhaps these unattractive qualities are not intrinsic to the concept of the 'sac itself.
ReplyDeleteBasic human needs for green spaces, walkability, neighborliness, and affordability can and should be addressed in considering ways to create livable cities. In many comments about cul-de-sacs, yards, it seems like creativity is lacking. We need to look at the living conditions humans desire most and use creativity to redefine ways to deliver those qualities rather than just tossing them out. For example, single-owner yards become shared yards/gardens and big/isolating suburban cul-de-sacs become urban-sized/connected.
Families with kids tend to feel the need for outdoor play spaces even more keenly, but all humans benefit from them. I don't understand why voicing a desire for these qualities in urban design is evil, soul-sucking, or suburbanite. The subtext in such comments is "you breeders should just go to the suburbs." In fact, people who love living in the city should be attracted to do so, and able to do so, throughout each phase and choice of life -- even into old age, for that matter. Whether you have kids or not, a city that allows for true diversity of family structure -- all the way from single people to couples without kids to families with kids of all ages to grandparents -- creates a vibrant, attractive environment for all.
A new interesting piece on culs-de-sac:
ReplyDeletehttp://marketurbanism.com/2014/02/20/culs-de-sac-for-safety/
I too am an unashamed lover of yards, yours, mine, and everybody's. Even a crappy yard holds potential. For several years I was a full-time pedestrian in the environs of UT, as having grown up in then-suburban Houston I found walking around town all day more interesting and novel than getting educated. That was a quarter-century ago but I still remember certain yards I went out of my way to walk past (in particular one in West Campus, with dozens of hardy jonquils, surely now gone?) and yards are still the keenest aspect of any walk, for me.
ReplyDeleteWhen the greenbelt is mainly a playground for privet, while simple maintenance - not to speak of landscaping - of Austin's existing parks and rights-of-way is apparently the kind of work we haven't been able to do, at least minus C3's involvement, since the last grownup died: what sucks my soul is the idea that a few ill-kept pocket parks or grassy strips, while possibly fostering the casually intense "only connect" moments that occasionally furnish New Yorker "Talk of the Town" pieces but tend to elude one in real life, can satisfactorily replace the private green space of central Austin.