On Tuesday Andrés Duany delivered the keynote speech at Residential Architect’s sixth annual Reinvention Symposium in Seattle. Widely regarded as a visionary in community planning and urban design, Duany is a founding principal of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, a founder of Congress for the New Urbanism and a leader in the development of SmartCode. He also ranked second in Planetizen's 2009 poll of top 100 urban thinkers, the results of which were announced this week.
Duany’s speech was a reflection on the recent crises plaguing America, as well as his personal agenda for retrofitting suburbia, halting the "ruralization" of cities and revamping the public process. Here are the highlights.
On Middle Class America as the Problem and the Solution
Three near-simultaneous “crises”—global warming, peak oil and the housing bubble—have recently jolted people from complacency, Duany said. And one culprit, according to Duany, is to blame for the current environmental crisis: the lifestyle of the American middle class. “It's how we consume land, how we transport ourselves, how we feed ourselves and what we do for pleasure," he said.
But why does he blame the middle class? The numbers of the wealthy are too few to make a difference, Duany said. While the wealthy can commission good design because they work directly with the architect, their numbers don’t add up in what he called a “game” of metrics. “The wealthy are very few,” he said.
Good design can take place for the poor—he cited the work Brad Pitt is doing in New Orleans as an example—but the poor don’t have much of a choice in the matter. "They are so grateful for a door…and a bathroom and a roof over their heads," he said. Similarly, people who live in areas that have severe housing shortages must “buy what architects decide they should have” because they have no other options.
“The problem with the middle class is that they don’t meet the architect,” he said.
But the middle class also presents the greatest opportunity. He urged the audience at the symposium not to “turn away” from the architects of the new urbanism. “What they are trying to do is change the world and they need to connect with the enormous middle class, which is in fact causing the problems," he said.
On Retrofitting Suburbia
More than 50 percent of development in America is suburban sprawl, according to Duany. But, he said, “that suburban sprawl is merely first generation urbanism.”
“Urbanism molts, it evolves,” he said.
As an example, he used the Fairmont Olympic Hotel in Seattle, where the conference was held. Duany said the hotel, which opened in 1907, probably sits where a much smaller brick building once stood. Before that, he guessed it was the site of a wooden house. And before that—a sod shack. “Cities evolve,” he said. “This is the story.”
To an architect, he said the present is meaningless. But the urbanist gets to work with something the architect does not have: time. “We can imagine how things can be outside of that limit of time,” he said.
“If you look at the suburbs you will see that much of it [is] potential cities,” he said. The typologies of suburbia—the shopping mall, the office park, the subdivisions—all have a “precious” commodity: the parking lot. “That parking lot is real estate, and that real estate can be densified," he said
For example, he views each mall as a potential town center (he noted that there are approximately 450 bankrupt malls in the U.S.). Located on intersections ideally spaced for transit and sized between 70 and 120 acres with 70 percent open space, he said the large stores in malls have the potential for becoming high schools and theaters. He told the young professionals in the audience that would be their life: “the retrofitting of suburbia.”
On Stopping the Ruralization of the City
The American environmental movement, according to Duany, was born out of the preservation of pristine wilderness. But this sets up the impossible: “When the ideal is wilderness, every human degrades that ideal,” he said.
The current green movement has become very literal. “People take cities and they ruralize them,” he said. But all of the naturalistic landscaping—the swales and high grasses—in reality creates a “maintenance nightmare” and deters urbanism. “Wherever you see naturalistic landscaping,” he said, “humans are not.” He asserted that street life does not occur in the swales and bushes.
Ruralizing the city undermines the notion of street life. “People willingly give up their yards out the backdoor when there is street life out the front door,” he said.
"Why would you live in [a] townhouse if you don't have a town?" he asked.
On Making Affordable Housing Truly Affordable
Duany said he began to engage the issue of affordable housing because his employees couldn’t afford housing. He realized he could design it, but “I found out I could not build affordable housing,” he said.
Calling his attempts a “total failure,” he said one of the problems was the number of permits necessary to complete a project—engineering certifications, inspections and approvals from the historic board all add cost. “The minute you engage bureaucracy it becomes virtually impossible to do [affordable] housing,” he said.
He called for legislation to opt out of the "nanny" state—the legislation would make it possible to sign a contract to bypass state and city regulations. Citing the aviation industry as an example, he said: "If you can do it with flight—something that flies—you can sure…do it with houses. And we have to get there."
He cited the mobile home as one way to break what he called the “cost problem.” Modular housing is high quality, he said, but not cheap (the minute it is assembled on site, a team of inspectors is necessary). A mobile home, like a car, is “self-inspected.” He said any architect that can design a mobile home that breaks the home’s visual blight but preserves the structure's fundamental intelligence is “going to win the lottery.”
On Ridding the Public Process of Vested Interests
Duany said urbanists speak a lot about public process—how it holds things up and raises prices. Noting the architecture community's growing lack of confidence in democracy, he said, “You can either lose confidence in democracy or recognize the public process is not democracy—it is something else.”
He called for a reform of the public process. Democracy, he said, calls for a random sample. "We are not getting a random sample,” he said. “The people we are bringing in are the immediate neighbors, they do not have the community as a whole in mind." The frustration with the process is "distorting everything and causing too many people to drop out."
Instead, to balance the vested interests of the neighbors and the developer, he called for a review committee—a jury—made up of a random sample of people. He said there is a good chance the jury, once educated about the project, will “come up with the right answer.”
