Guest Author
Cold snaps this time of year make spring seem faraway. Yet, Major Leaguers are reporting to Spring Training to refine their skills before the first pitch of the 2015 season. Avenir Holdings LLC, the Coral Gables-based developer proposing to create Palm Beach County’s 15th-largest town on the 7-square-mile Vavrus Ranch site, should be reporting to a version of Spring Training of its own.
Avenir Holdings has begun referring to its proposal as “New Urbanist.” My previous article on Avenir suggested using a New Urbanist approach to create a self-sustaining, pedestrian-oriented community with a tiny environmental footprint. I believe this approach is critically important. This large undeveloped parcel in Palm Beach Gardens is surrounded by environmentally sensitive land that city, county and state authorities have chosen to preserve.
If Avenir is to contribute to the long-range plan for this region of Palm Beach County that aims to preserve and enhance the historic water flows to the Loxahatchee River and protect appropriate levels of diversity of native plants and wildlife, it cannot be a place that brings tens of thousands of vehicle trips per day to the region.
A truly New Urbanist approach could create a traditional small town that is not car-dependent and is a visionary case study for smart sustainable development.
Urban Planning Spring Training for Avenir could give its developers the skills to step up to the plate and hit the New Urbanist ball out of the park. At present, however, they are just wearing the uniform and hoping they are not called to the plate to reveal that they can’t hit the curve ball of visionary planning.
New Urbanism is not new. Its roots can be traced to the writing of Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, and the Congress for New Urbanism has been in existence for 23 years. Quite simply, there is too much history, collective knowledge, and organization for developers to just will their project to be New Urbanist with words, and dressing it in the team uniform.
The Congress for New Urbanism, as a part of its charter, lists 27 principles “to guide public policy, development practice, urban planning and design.” The first nine address regional planning. The second nine offer guidance on neighborhood and district design, and the final nine speak to the intimate scale blocks, streets and buildings must have to recapture the charm of a small town, or urban neighborhood.
The Avenir project follows none of the first nine principles of regional planning. Since New Urbanism is an anti-car, anti-sprawl approach to regional planning that advocates against the isolating effects of “leap frog” developments that place thousands of roof tops miles away from urban service areas and town centers, this is not surprising. Strike One!
The second nine principles for neighborhood and district planning contain three principles that allow developments such as Avenir to wear the New Urbanist uniform without having to face any tough pitches. Principles 16, 17, and 18 recommend a concentration of civic, institutional and commercial activity, the adoption of design guidelines, and parks within neighborhoods. Since many conventional suburban sprawl housing developments can, and often do, meet these three criteria, disingenuous developers typically grab onto them to conceal the reality of a development proposal that is diametrically opposed to the broader set of principles for New Urbanism. Putting these three back into the context of the other six that advocate for investment in existing neighborhoods – or new neighborhoods – that are within walking distance of community activities, connected to transit corridors and offer a full range of housing types shows that Avenir is missing the mark again. Strike Two!
The final nine principles address how a regionally appropriate development with pedestrian neighborhoods and a broad range of housing and employment opportunities puts on the finishing touches, architecturally speaking, through pedestrian-scaled streets, blocks and buildings. The importance of creating an environment that accommodates the automobile in ways that are secondary to more public forms of transportation must be reinforced by the things that exist at a more intimate scale. Sidewalks, buildings, and public places that encourage shared use and are connected to the broader theme of the urban center are important. Avenir’s requisite faux town center looks just like this, and provides the perfect foil for architectural renderings of a false reality. For it is a town center that will be literally miles from the most remote cul-de-sac neighborhoods in Avenir and will typically house only high-end restaurants and retailers because those are what’s profitable. Though a nice place to drive to, it will be merely a caricature of what New Urbanism strives to create – self-sustaining towns and urban environments that are free from car dependency because their residents can walk to the things they need, and share in a community that is prideful of its civic buildings and public places. Strike Three!
Unless Avenir embraces fully that its developers are proposing a place for 11,000 people to live who will bring tens of thousands of daily automobile trips in and out of an otherwise protected environmentally important region of our county, they are not being responsive to the regional master plan of this area.
Unless Avenir developers embraces the reality that a truly New Urbanist community would be small enough, and dense enough, to allow 90 to 95 percent of Vavrus Ranch to be set aside for ecological concerns, their claim to be New Urbanist is disingenuous, and they fail to appreciate the environmental importance of this region. Unless Avenir embraces the reality that a self-sustaining pedestrian community that brings very few cars into it or out of it because it is designed as – and then nurtured into – a functioning small town and an independent municipality, it should not be referred to as New Urbanist, and it should not be placed on the Vavrus Ranch site.
Timothy Hullihan is an architect and freelance writer living in North Palm Beach.
