Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
'place', as well as 'the design code'—the guiding principles and design references
that are the all-important place-makers (Scully
1994
, p. 227).
Lennertz (
1991
) has suggested that there are seven design principles in NTD.
The community must be based on a comprehensive master plan which lays out
the core geometry and hierarchy of places within the development. In addition the
designed street network should provide appropriate connectivity and is able to ac-
cept orderly future growth. There should also be a pedestrian network design that
separates pedestrians from automobiles, and which ensures flows through parks,
squares, and alleys. Also, street section designs ought to ensure human scale, ap-
propriate building proportions. There should also be orderly parking and vegetative
areas. In addition, a regulating plan must outline the zoning of building types and
provide for integration, rather than separation, of different uses. The TND approach
also specifically includes attention to public buildings and squares to ensure they
are distributed throughout the neighbourhoods and to coordinate civic and open
spaces. Finally, the planning codes are a central principle, paying particular atten-
tion to both architectural controls (materials, building configurations, reference to
historic style, vernacular elements, etc.), and urban regulations that control how
separate developments coordinate with the broader public spaces of the design. In
Lennertz's (
1991
, p. 22) words, the design codes should
“encourage variety while
ensuring the harmony required to give character to the community.”
One of the most cited applications of this type of design framework can be seen
in what is commonly recognized as the first TND in the U.S.A.—that of Seaside
(Mohney and Easterling
1991
). Figure
2.1
shows the plan of Seaside, which was
built on an 80 acre (32 ha) site on Florida's northwest Gulf Coast between Panama
City Beach and Destin, 150 km from Mobile. It was designed by Duaney and Plater-
Zyberk and has just celebrated its 30th anniversary. This project quickly became
the coffee-table-book icon of NU (Brooke 1995). It is considered by many to be
beautiful, cute, and appealing, and gained notoriety when it was used as the set
location of the film '
The Truman Show'
. The building code of Seaside established
an overriding rubric of building types and functions, and laid down how they are to
be integrated into the final form of the town. For example, the rubric defined eight
building types, including Retail, Residential, Workshop, functions etc., and then
specified how different features of the building must be coordinated and integrat-
ed into the plan, establishing detailed restrictions on the design of yards, porches,
outbuildings, parking facilities, and building heights, with further details shown in
Brooke (1995, p. 31). The idea was to create a 'beach town' using examples from all
over the southern states, with houses of different styles, colours, and picket fences,
together with porches to see the setting sun, as well as a desire to increase sociabil-
ity. The settlement's motto is 'A Simple, Beautiful Life', suggesting the rationale
for a slower pace of life, a concept more completely expressed in the later Italian
movement called Cittaslow (Chap. 15). Yet although attractive, the area is really
a resort community, and like the old neighbourhood units, contains very limited
employment opportunities. Politically it is an unincorporated unit in the county of
Walton, so has no formal government, and only built its first school, one of the new
charter schools, in 1996. Functionally it is hardly a town, so apart from its design, it
