Community Character: Principles for Design and Planning

Kendig

INTRODUCTION

Why Should We Care About Community Character?

Character is often used to describe the elements of a community that make it unique, memorable, livable, and inviting. These elements can be hard to define. An often-heard example is a desire to preserve small town character. This isn’t just a motherhood-and-apple-pie vision, but can be defined or measured using community character tools. In this book I introduce those tools—a community character system for describing the physical form of communities and resulting lifestyle, residential, work, and retail opportunities. It provides a systematic approach to converting vague visions or goals of citizens and officials to measurable elements that can be made into a plan.

The community character system has four major elements—state, scale, class and type of character, and community form—each of which provides the tools for planners to plan a development, neighborhood, or municipality. State and scale in particular are intended to make planners and citizens more aware of how their community functions and the consequences of planning or zoning decisions. Scale is powerfully linked to shopping, employment, and cultural opportunities. Those opportunities benefit known populations and service areas. Increasing scale results in changing work patterns and increased commercial, resulting in increased traffic volumes and congestion. The character types also relate to social and economic aspects of the community. Type involves three classes of character—urban, sub-urban, and rural—that are divided into eight types: urban core, urban, auto-urban, suburban, estate, countryside, agriculture, and natural. These focus on design elements that create the character types. The last major element—form—addresses three principal strategies for the design of settlements: compositional, group, and mega. Planning and architectural literature has primarily focused on the urban character type.

The number of elements composing character reflects the complexity of the built environment’s interaction with the social and economic objectives and diverse desires of municipalities and citizens. Flexibility is essential. A planning approach that retains or enhances community character cannot be rigid; it must provide principles to be applied, rather than a template that merely dictates street width or how a building is placed on a lot.

WHY COMMUNITY CHARACTER?

Community character is a powerful tool that can incorporate architectural or environmental context to provide a community with a strong vision that carries through to zoning regulations. For example, in 1994 Teton County and the Town of Jackson, Wyoming, adopted a plan and zoning ordinance based on community character by using seven of the eight character types. The regulations contained a limitation on house size to keep new, large homes in scale with existing ranches and to limit the visual impact that new development would have on the area’s scenic beauty. A person who illegally built a larger home unsuccessfully challenged the regulations in the courts. The following quotes from the Wyoming Supreme Court illustrate the power of character: Teton County’s choice of the word ‘character’ in conjunction with the words ‘rural’ and ‘western’ connotes something that is quite clear, especially given Teton County’s documentation of the plan.... Indeed, preserving community character is at the very heart of zoning and planning legislation.¹

Since New York City adopted zoning in 1916 and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld its legality in Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. in 1926, the practice has been an important tool in protecting neighborhood character. Go to a zoning hearing today and you will hear citizens concerned that some proposed use will destroy the character of their neighborhood. This continued citizen concern means planners must do a better job of understanding and protecting character.

There are six primary reasons for understanding and using a community character system as a tool. First, protecting character was the primary rationale for zoning, which is the planner’s primary tool for implementing plans.² Second, although character provided the rationale for zoning, plans and zoning were based largely on land use and density, neither of which measures the character or quality of development. Third, while there are eight types of character, the existing literature focuses almost exclusively on one of three urban types, providing no design guidance for the other seven types. Fourth, there has been a succession of architectural visions of the urban ideal that have failed, yet we are now seeing a new batch of architect-driven visions peddled as the universal template (see below). Fifth, while the design of communities is very important, there are social, economic, environmental, cultural, and other physical elements linked to character that must be understood if physical planning is to be realistic. Lastly, there must be a means to measure character so it is not just a concept that sounds nice but cannot be reliably converted to a design or regulation.

Over the last hundred years there has been a succession of architectural visions of the ideal form of communities. World-famous architects Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright held mutually exclusive views. Le Corbusier championed an urban community of stark, high- and medium-rise buildings, while Wright envisioned Broadacre City, a low-density community largely dependent on automobiles. The Le Corbusier model can be blamed to some degree for the soulless public housing disasters in American cities, and the Wright model can be blamed for inviting suburban sprawl. Paolo Soleri took a totally different approach by advocating that whole cities be created as a single building. While this extreme approach has never been realized, it has potential value at a smaller scale. The latest of these architecturally dominated approaches, the Transect,³ is being promoted by New Urbanists as a universal template. The New Urbanist movement seeks a return to well-designed urban places, but the model advocated by some New Urbanists is nearly as rigid as the very zoning they decry.

The approaches of these architects, past and present, have value for individual projects, but their rigidity and template character make them unsuited for planning entire communities. These approaches attempt to fit people into the architect’s vision. Planning for community character recognizes the full range of physical environments that people want or that function demands; it is a palette with many different components. This approach identifies the critical elements and design principles of each character type and the unique characteristics of each community, in order to retain the character or guide the community over time to a new character.

Comprehensive plans for communities look at character, form, or land use as only one element of the overall vision. Social, cultural, economic, recreation, and transportation elements are equally important to the success of the plan, but are generally separated as topics from the physical form and character of the community. The community character system outlined here seeks to link the physical to social, economic, cultural, environmental, and other elements. It also recognizes that different characters represent differing lifestyle preferences.

Both comprehensive plans and zoning ordinances have been based on two quantifiable measures: density and land use. The focus on density is perhaps the more troubling of the two, because the average citizen erroneously believes that higher density threatens community character, which has resulted in much low-density, sprawling development. In reality this is not usually the case, as seen in figures 0-1a and 0-1b, where the lower-density example (0-1a) is viewed by most as having a less-desirable character than the higher-density example (0-1b). Density is not an accurate measure of character, as architects have long known. Evaluating the character or quality of a neighborhood and then determining the appropriate density would likely lead to more compact, livable communities.

Figure 0-1a. Density: one dwelling unit per acre, urban street cross section, open lawns. Chesterfield, Missouri.

Figure 0-1b. Density: three dwelling units per acre, rural street cross section, lawn maintained in native forest vegetation. New Seabury, Massachusetts.

Land use has similar problems. Planners and citizens developed a hierarchy of land uses, with single-family being higher or better, and industry being lower or less desirable. This encourages separating uses, rather than designing them to fit the neighborhood character. In figures 0-2a and 0-2b, two commercial land uses have very different qualities and character types. This illustrates that most uses can be designed to the desired character. In fact, it is possible for most residential, commercial, and office land uses to be designed for community character in all five of the urban and sub-urban character types.

Commercial areas with buildings built to the sidewalk line can be of either low or high quality. A lack of sign control, landscaping, and architectural design results in low-quality urban, as seen in figure 0-3a. Attention to the architecture, street trees, signage control, and pavement details results in high-quality urban, as seen in figure 0-3b. It is the details of design that determine quality, not the use or application of the build to the sidewalk template rule.

In reviewing the design literature, the vast majority addresses only one of the eight character types present today—urban. Most do not mention scale, state, or form. Community character covers the full range of communities, and provides for both their measurement as well as their design for livability. This approach will enable planners to plan for all types of communities in order to meet resident needs.

The vision statements in most plans use words like rural, small town, suburban, or urban that are not well defined or are unrelated to the zoning. For example, the district created to preserve rural land uses frequently permits subdivision into one- to five-acre suburban lots, which replaces rural land uses with homes. Likewise, a community vision that calls for the preservation of small town character while proposing to double in population is suspect. By quantifying character, it becomes possible to evaluate the plan for consistency.

Figure 0-2a. Urban commercial: built to sidewalk line, street parking, 95 percent impervious. Carmel, California.

Figure 0-2b. Estate commercial: built in wooded area with trees in parking lot, 20 percent impervious. New Seabury, Massachusetts.

Figure 0-3a. Poor design, inconsistent facades, no trees, large signs means poor quality. McAllen, Texas.

Figure 0-3b. High-quality design provides architecture, landscaping, and sign control. Carmel, California.

As planners, it is obvious that while the character elements are fixed, they are in a dynamic relationship. The balance—the share of the population living in each of the three classes—responds to changes in technology, economics, and social desires. For most of history, communities were of the smallest (population) scale—hamlets and villages. These were freestanding communities where most of the population lived and worked the surrounding land. The fact that they were freestanding, separated from others by farm fields, created a strong visual character of urban communities dotting the rural landscape. Most of these communities were considered urban, even though they were economically dependent on the surrounding agricultural lands. Urban describes the relationship of buildings, streets, and spaces, where buildings crowd the street, creating enclosed spaces.

The automobile and skyscraper created two new character types—auto-urban and urban core—that vastly altered the balance among the urban, sub-urban, and rural classes. These advances shifted populations from small areas (freestanding communities) growing food and fiber to metropolitan areas (composite communities). In the United States, sub-urban types evolved from a trivial share of the population to a major share. With the development of the automobile, urban gave way to auto-urban. As planners or policymakers, having a comprehensive understanding of community character—state, scale, type, and form—is critical if plans and zoning are to produce communities that are livable and sustainable.

CHALLENGES FOR THE FUTURE

Planning is facing new challenges, especially global warming and the energy crisis. Many American communities are sprawling forms that rely on energy-gobbling automobiles. There is active debate about how planning should address these problems. Will we have to shift to a more urban character to reduce the use of automobiles, or will more efficient cars and alternative fuels offset the energy and global greenhouse-gas-emission problems? The current balance has a predominance of Americans living in sub-urban communities. How will changing attitudes and strategies regarding energy and global warming alter the balance among types?

Community character does not dictate the balance, but it is important for planners to understand the drivers for different types in order to provide guidance on how to achieve the desired character in any type of community. The desired character must be formulated by how society and technology confront these problems. Community character provides the tools to plan for communities of all states, scales, types, and forms. All will continue to exist even if the balance is drastically changed.

There is little written about why and how to take a comprehensive approach to community character. This book and the subsequent volume, A Guide to Planning for Community Character , have been developed to fill this void. Community Character begins by providing the needed vocabulary for planners and designers to understand and address character. Later chapters address three major ways of thinking about or describing character—state and scale, character types, and community forms—and explain how to measure character.

Community Character does not seek to dictate choice or provide a template. The market, technology, and individual desires interact to constrain or encourage choices. The community character system makes no judgment as to the desirability of a character type, state, scale, or form. They all exist, and a new one may evolve in response to technology. All represent valid choices; the effort is to provide the design principles for the desired character type.

Too often the concern for character has been thought of as aesthetics, which vary in the eye of the beholder. Community character is not about beauty, but about the linkage between how our communities are designed and how they function. Individuals will vary in their opinion of character types. Their decision about a character type to live in is also affected by social and economic constraints. The community character system is value-neutral; all the character types are presented with their accompanying social and economic conditions. All types have a segment of the population that values them because they meet their needs. We live in a very diverse society, and that diversity is good. All the types and scales are needed, and have both positive and negative aspects that should be understood. Having all the types actually is beneficial to a rich and diverse