Paleo Places - Chapter 1

Paleo Places

If you are unable to understand the cause of the problem it is impossible to solve it.

  -Naoto Kan

Banners and Awnings

As I mentioned earlier, my initial skepticism toward New Urbanism/Neo-traditionalism was that it seemed to be yet another “Planning Bandwagon” on to which we all would leap. 

When I was a grad student at Ball State in the 80’s, we often joked about all the cities that were then jumping on the Downtown Convention Center Bandwagon.  Downtown convention centers were supposed to save downtowns. Everyone was doing it. Hell, Gary, Indiana – A steel city crippled by the closure of steel mills, and now bereft and crime ridden – had recently put in a downtown convention center.

When I graduated and started working in Florida, “nodes” were the new Planning Bandwagon. The logic was that “strip commercial” was bad. To combat strip commercial, retail would be forced to locate at nodes (intersections of major roads), and not to be strung out for miles along a given corridor. 

While the land planners in Tampa were forcing commercial developers to build within a prescribed number of feet of major intersections, the government transportation planners were busy prohibiting driveways too close to the same intersections. The disconnect illustrated by the land planners forcing development into areas that did not meet the transportation planners’ driveway spacing criteria is, of course, just a detail when we are discussing “big picture” urban planning trends. But, it is a very telling detail. All of these “movements” or planning bandwagons represent huge financial investment on the one hand, and high-stakes social experiments, on the other. People are living, dying, and raising kids in these places we are building, and it seems as though we are jumping on and off of these Planning Bandwagons without enough thoughtful consideration – especially given the enormous repercussions of these decisions. 

The next Planning Bandwagon presents a great case in point for discussing repercussions and unintended consequences. The Florida Growth Management Act of 1985 contained a mandate for a thing called “concurrency”. As the name of the act implies, Florida was trying to manage rampant growth. And concurrency was going to be part of that growth management package. Simply put, concurrency meant that public facilities – think road capacity – had to be available “concurrently” with the actual construction of the development. In other words, if you were going to build, say, a subdivision you had to do a study to see what roads your traffic would impact. If your forecast showed that the roads you would impact did not have adequate capacity to handle 

your traffic, you could either down-size your project or mitigate your traffic by making some type of improvement to the transportation system. 

Now, we come to the unintended consequence. Florida had, and has, major traffic congestion. Generally speaking, the traffic is worse in the cities and gets better and better when you get out of the cities. It did not take long before developers started commissioning “due diligence” traffic studies before they even closed on properties to ascertain what their transportation impacts and associated cost would be. Markets demanded that they look for low cost properties to develop, and the properties with lowest associated transportation concurrency cost were generally outside of the cities. This made rural areas even more attractive to developers and increased urban sprawl! 

As I write this, some current Planning Bandwagons include trolleys and the Neo-traditional villages with which we began. Is there a trolley system being constructed in a city near you? Trolleys are returning to cities across the United States.  I guess that my opinion on trolleys is…that I don’t have a blanket opinion on trolleys!  Trolleys are neither inherently appropriate nor inappropriate.  Every city, every neighborhood is certainly different, and so each situation must be carefully studied to see what, if any, benefits a trolley could offer.

In fact, this illustrates the very essence of the point that I am making about Planning Bandwagons.  One size does not fit all. Maybe a trolley in Tampa is a great way to connect the cruise ship terminals in Channelside with the tourist attractions in the old Cuban cigar town of Ybor City.  But, does this mean that a trolley is a good idea in Cincinnati?  Maybe it is.  Maybe it isn’t. Downtown pedestrian malls (built during that Planning Bandwagon in the seventies and eighties) did not flourish as intended in many cities.  Similarly, bringing trolleys to downtown areas is a modern Planning Bandwagon.  

Is “Paleo Places” another Planning Bandwagon?  

I don't think so.

It is as different from the bandwagons as inductive reasoning is from deductive reasoning.  Trying out different ideas that look “cool” in an architect's rendering to see how they work out is inductive planning.  Developing a set of criteria (Characteristics of Paleo Places) of what humans need in an environment in order to thrive, and then working to include those elements in the environment is a deductive, logical approach to urban planning.

Chapter 1:  My Epiphany

“Celebration is the devil,” sniffed my then twenty-eight year old son, Josh.  We were all living in Tampa, Florida, at the time, and he and some friends had gone to Orlando to visit their old high school buddy, Jose.

While there, they had checked out the little Neo-traditional town that Disney built – Celebration, Florida.  And, now Josh, my eldest, was calling to commiserate.

He continued, “We got out and walked around the little downtown area.  Jordan said it was straight out of “The Stepford Wives.”  I haven’t seen that movie yet, so I couldn’t comment.  But, I did think it was pretty creepy.”

In addition to a motherly interest in the views of my son, I also had a professional interest in what Josh had to say about Celebration.  I am an urban planner.   And, at that time I had worked as both a private and public sector urban planner for about 25 years.   I had also been collecting notes, thoughts, anecdotes, clippings and fragments of ideas for at least that many years toward writing what I jokingly referred to as my planning manifesto.

My book was supposed to cut through all of the planning and architectural trends and distill the pure essence of what people needed and wanted in a built environment.  People were just highly evolved animals, I reasoned; therefore, it must be possible to design and build an ideal habitat for them.  My thought was that there must be a set of definable elements that should be included in people's environments that would really optimize how they lived, ate, play, raised their children...

Some of the things that I had been investigating and collecting up to that point were pictures and site plans of very early human settlements.  I was trying to assemble a list of things that might be common to settlements across Asia, Europe, and the Americas -- things that I could point to and say, "These are the basic, instinctual things that people need in their cities and towns."   Things like houses, temples, open spaces...

Caption:  Celebration, Florida, is a New Urbanist town deliberately designed and built to look as though it were constructed in a by-gone era.

Caption:  Store in Celebration, Florida.

And, it was against this backdrop that Josh and I had our phone call about Celebration that day.  Josh used the word 'creepy' to describe Celebration.  And, it was not the first time that I had heard Celebration or other Neo-traditional, or New Urbanist, towns and villages described as creepy or scary.

I knew from Social Psychology classes that I had had in college, that feeling that something is creepy or scary, or having feelings of anxiety about something, all revert back to the primary emotion of Fear.  Sure, Josh and his friends did not run screaming out of Celebration, and it is easy to laugh and dismiss the undercurrent of fear, and I think that that is why nobody had addressed it head on up until this point.

But, I felt that if I could unlock what was causing that - albeit subtle -  fear reaction, that creepy feeling, then I could begin to distill how a person's environment affected him or her on a most basic, most primal level.  This is what I had been after - an idea of what people's most natural, most suitable environment would be like!

I put the leash on Jasmine, our husky/German shepherd, and started to walk.  I walked to the end of the block of our modern subdivision, past the almost matching pastel stucco houses around the corner and into the park.  The grass was rough St. Augustine - bred to withstand the hot Florida summers - but even so, patches of weeds and sand dotted the turf.  Plus, there was always the very real danger of fire ants, so Jasmine and I stuck to the bright, new sidewalks.  

She nosed around, and I pondered shiny new towns designed to look old, and primal feelings of fear and love.  And, just as we were passing the basketball courts, I got it!  It came to me!  I figured out what the key was to distilling man's environmental needs, and the idea for this book was born.

Read on...