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Duan/s book on Agrarian Urbanism, which
proposes a landscape of homegrown food
production as a path towards resilience, is
very explicit in its desire to make that plan
ning approach the 20th real estate product, to
supplement the 19 standard ones that define
development today.
Another example that comes to mind is
Christopher Alexander's "Oregon Experiment,"
an attempt to implement his egalitarian
"Pattern language" approach in the master
plan of the University of Oregon. Pattern
Languages consist of various ideas about
spaces and relationships in the built environ
ment, which become essentially a menu of
potential strategies that combine to produce
plays has uniquely defined New Urbanism as
an approach to sustainability. Critics have
often taken the planning philosophy to task
for its perpetuation of typical greenfield,
development—suggesting that it's simply
a small-town skin on the same old, bad
development—but that's precisely the point.
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A while back, I wrote about the potential
for "Occupy"-mspired patterns of ownership
to alter our patterns of consumption and,
ultimately, our built environment The Occupy
movement had put out a call for people to
move their money from big corporate banks
to member-owned credit unions. Financial
services aren't the only corporate
products we consume, though,
and there are already many mod
els, from electric memberships to
community-supported agriculture
and from co-housing to carpool
ing, that would enable a substan
tial shift to community-driven
infrastructure that is perhaps
more environmentally and socially
responsible.
The phrase "form follows
finance" comes to mind as a suit
able reworking of the old archi
tectural axiom. It was the title of
Carol Willis' book on the evolution
of skyscrapers in New York and
Chicago, which she character
ized as distinct "vernaculars of
capitalism." Indeed, much of the
landscape of sprawl around us is
virtually untouched by profes
sional architecture and design as
we usually think of it It is a ver
nacular landscape, but its defining
features aren't based on the .use
of local materials or response to
climate, as we traditionally define
vernacular. The key factor is in
fact finance, with banks providing
the necessary capital almost exclu
sively for the most conservative
modes of development, producing
the residential subdivisions and
commercial strips we know today. Return on
investment, ratiier than utility of the spaces
created, is the goal.
New Urbanism pioneer Andr6s Duany, in
his recent lecture about "Agrarian Urbanism"
at the University of Georgia, hinted at this
issue. And indeed the role that finance
UGA's historic Rutherford Hall is currently being demolished, rather than restored. Are UGA’s planning decisions shaped more by statehouse
and Real Estate Foundation financing than good design and preservation principles?
New Urbanism heads towards sustainability
by attempting to make the typical real estate
transactions more sustainable by tweaking
design without altering the fundamen
tal nature of those transactions, instead
embracing the existing world of finance to
propel new ideas forward.
truly comfortable spaces for people. The
experiment, Alexander noted, more or less
failed in one big way. He thought that what
the campus needed was a program of small
interventions and repairs, defined by faculty,
students and other users. The way campus
buildings are funded, though, is by acts of
the state Legislature, and so they tend to be
large, monolithic projects.
The effects of finance on the University
of Georgia campus are quite similar, not only
due to massive structures like the Student
Learning Center, but also to the machinations
of the UGA Real Estate Foundation. Rutherford
HaU, currently being demolished, just didn't
fit into that organization's approach to issu
ing bonds for parking decks and dormitories;
tearing it down to build a new one does.
If we go farther than Duany, and make a
serious attempt to take control of the build
ing of bur communities away from the bank
ers and real estate professionals, what might
that look like? Scale would be smaller; build
ings would grow more incremen
tally, with additions and repairs
over time. Areas would become
more eclectic due to the distinct
tastes of many agents, rather than
reflecting assumptions about what
will be most acceptable to as
many potential customers as pos
sible. At least in commercial areas,
things might start to look like
downtown Athens.
This is the crucial way in which
projects like Selig's plans for a
Walmart-anchored outdoor mall
downtown will always fail. Form
follows finance, and the key fea
ture of successful Main Streets like
Clayton Street and College Avenue
is that they are created by hun
dreds and thousands of different
small transactions over time. They
Yan't be made in one fell swoop,
with one builder, one architect
and one loan. That's how malls
are built, and so long as Selig
manages what it builds as a mall,
that's all it can ever be.
The question this raises in my
mind is what all those alterna
tives—the co-ops, co-housing,
EMCs and community-driven
projects—might have the poten
tial to produce. I don't know what
a world driven by that kind of
finance might look like, but it certainly seems
like the priorities that would necessarily drive
building with that kind of approach are funda
mentally different from the profit motivations
that have produced our current environment.
Kevan Williams alhensrising@flagpole.com
6 FlAGPOLE.COM JUNE 13.2012