Word: platers
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Duany and Plater-Zyberk are not anti-development. Indeed, businesspeople seem to like them and their notions of enlightened self-interest. Joseph Alfandre, the man behind Kentlands and Belmont, had been a very successful developer of rather routine suburban pods around Washington. In 1988 he was considering land-use plans for the 352-acre Kentlands site. Then he heard about Duany and Plater-Zyberk, became a convert, canceled his plans and started over...
...what worries Duany and Plater-Zyberk most are their pseudo followers, developers and architects who apply a gloss of ye-olde-towne charm without supplying any of the deeper, more fundamental elements of old-fashioned urban coherence. Calthorpe agrees emphatically. "You can have nice streets, and you can put trees back on them, and you can make beautiful buildings with front porches again, but if the only place it leads is out to the expressway, then we are going to have the same environment all over again...
Duany and Plater-Zyberk have devised a practical way to wield influence beyond the projects they can plan and design each year. They have drafted a Traditional Neighborhood Development ordinance that can plug right into the existing system -- and subvert it. The T.N.D. is a boilerplate document that codifies the nuts-and-bolts wisdom Duany and Plater-Zyberk have acquired, which cities, towns and counties can enact. "The T.N.D. thinks of things like corner stores the way other codes think of sewers," Duany explains. "Everybody simply knows you have to have them." More than 200 local planning departments and officials...
...seems incredible that such a simple, even obvious premise -- that America's 18th and 19th century towns remain marvelous models for creating new suburbs -- had been neglected for half a century. Yet until Duany and Plater- Zyberk came along, even envisioning a practical alternative to dreary cookie-cutter suburbs had become almost impossible...
...agree that preserving historic buildings and districts is a good thing. In the 1980s both architectural postmodernism and the Rouse phenomenon -- the transformation of decrepit white elephants into spiffy inner-city shopping centers -- reminded people that old-fashioned buildings and commercial bustle were great pleasures. Today Duany and Plater- Zyberk, Calthorpe and their allies are proposing to go all the way, to build wholly new towns and cities the way our ancestors did. If the 1990s really lives up to its wishful early line -- a return to hearth and home, a redoubled environmental concern, humbler, simpler -- then the new decade...