Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
computer applications. “Nowadays, digitizing images and altering them is
commonplace,”Valle says, but it was not so at that time. Although comput-
ers had been used by architects and designers since the early 1970s,Valle's
approach to the technology was highly innovative. He developed a project
“that looked for the first time at using video and CAD [Computer Aided
Drawing] to simulate before-and-after conditions. I captured video of an
existing condition and then using CAD overlaid a wire-frame image of an
architectural proposal.” The simulated environment was a tool that could
help developers and government officials visualize a planner's concept,
facilitating the decision-making process.
Valle's studies at UMSA included a course taught by Andrés Duany, a
faculty member who, with his partner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, was among
the foremost pioneers of the New Urbanism. The basic principles of the
movement resonated with Valle's own sensibility about urban communities.
According to Valle, the essential ideas of New Urbanism are the following:
• the establishment of public space—plazas, squares, and green spaces—
where people can come together
• a return to a pedestrian scale, where goods and services are within walk-
ing distance for most residents and where broad sidewalks encourage walk-
ing and mingling, in contrast to the dominance of the automobile that is
part of contemporary suburban sprawl
• an emphasis on diversity through mixed usage and mixed housing types,
so that residential, commercial, and recreational needs can all be met within
a neighborhood, with people of different economic levels living in prox-
imity as members of the same community
• creation of a strong sense of identity for the neighborhood, to distinguish
it clearly from surrounding neighborhoods and communities.
In 1987 Valle worked with Duany and Plater-Zyberk to computerize
the urban codes of Seaside, a town they had designed in the 1970s as one
of the first manifestations of the New Urbanism. “Urban code” is a term
used by the New Urbanists in preference to the standard term “zoning law.”
Valle explains that, while zoning laws are associated with restrictive meas-
ures, isolating neighborhoods to one income level, one building type, or
one function, urban codes “are about creating places that have a mix of in-
comes, building types, and uses.”The distinction in connotation is important,
