What Is Community Design, Anyway?
half century the nation has rushed to growth with no clear vision for the product it would produce. The art of city planning was replaced by a preoccupation with parcel plan reviews that focus myopically on the minutiae of detail rather than on how to accommodate growth effectively to make better places for people to live. Town building all but disappeared during this time, with both professionals and average citizens failing to recognize the product of this policy—or perhaps they just became powerless to prevent it within the criteria that had been established. Either way, we must reassess this process and again begin to think of our communities as living organisms that must sustain themselves. We must realize that communities need to adapt and grow because they are guided by a predetermined vision rather than as a result of a set of mandated minimums.
Why Design Community? Communities thrive because they have a reason for being. This reason for being is not something that has been erroneously contrived but rather is a response to some external force or desire from the people who live there. When the reason to exist endures, a community can change and adapt to the societal evolution that inevitably occurs, whether it is the industrial revolution or the information revolution. Regardless of their founders’ reasons for creating them, the great places (e.g., cities, communities) of the world have survived because they fulfill the commercial, social, and psychological needs of their citizens. The character and identity for which they are well known have developed as a direct response to their citizens’ needs for order and sense of place. The success of these places is due in large part to the trial-and-error method of the forbears of community and city planning as they refined the best components of each place while discarding the unsuccessful, hapless ones that failed to serve their intended purpose. That which remains is more than a testimony to their ingenuity—it reveals the present stage of the place’s continuing evolutionary process of development. Today, technology allows us to change the form of our cities and communities with such speed that the incremental changes which once occurred over the course of centuries now can be completed in only a matter of decades. The patterns of growth that led to the development of cities such as Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, can be re-created, for good or
5
The development and redevelopment of towns and cities should respect historical patterns, precedents, and boundaries. Charter of the Congress of New Urbanism