From the October/November 2007 issue of New Urban News

‘Organic’ layouts arise in England, Central America

 Courtesy of Seth Harry & Associates
A number of new urbanists, landscape designer Douglas Duany among them, are working on developments in Central America or England that have an organic quality reminiscent of communities from the Middle Ages.
In a phone interview from Poundbury, England, where he is working for the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, Duany said one of the characteristics of this work is “an acute topographic responsiveness.” Medieval hill towns, Duany noted, were built with a series of levels. Where there was a flat piece of land, it often became the village square.
Medieval communities not infrequently had multiple centers, focusing on castles, palaces, monasteries, or churches. The street network connected those centers, but usually not with a regular grid. There might be straight, curved, and irregular streets. “In reality, there’s an entire universe of geometry out there,” Duany observed.
Containment of space, an important feature of medieval design, was exhibited in a series of spaces, each of them unique. Their varied character helped produce places that various households or groups would consider their own. Sharp deflections in the streets, common in the Middle Ages, now serve the modern purpose of discouraging motorists from speeding through town.
Today’s practitioners of this kind of design allow considerable variation in block sizes. “There are fat blocks and there are thin blocks,” Duany said. “You don’t worry too much about the width of a block.”
The ten-year-old village of Poundbury, designed by Leon Krier for Prince Charles as an extension of the old town of Dorchester, England, was probably the first attempt to apply these planning ideas to a new urbanist development.
“I never call it medieval; I call it organic,” Duany said of this kind of design. There was, he noted, a considerable variety of layouts in the Middle Ages, including the highly planned French bastide towns of the 13th and 14th centuries — a topic that planning historian John Reps discussed brilliantly in a CNU Council in Santa Fe in 2002.
Krier and other new urbanists, including Duany, Bill Dennis, Seth Harry, Jaime Correa, Juan Pablo Rosales, Geoff Dyer, Peter Swift, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Eddie Castillo, have worked on projects in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Costa Rica that have organic traits. Jaydean Boldt of Calgary, Alberta, anticipates that he will be working on projects in Trinidad and Mexico within the next several months.

COSTA RICA RESORT
Recently Duany was involved in designing Las Catalinas, a 1,200-acre development on the Pacific Coast in Costa Rica, for Atlanta-based developer Charles Brewer. Brewer says the sources of planning ideas for Las Catalinas include Seaside and nearby developments in Florida and “the great hill towns and seaside towns of the Mediterranean,” filled with “lessons on car-light and car-free urbanism.”
The hill towns at Las Catalinas, according to Brewer, will be “highly responsive to the topography,” including peaks of about 200 meters (656 feet). They are expected to be car-free. The development will also have a primary beach town, most of it off limits to cars, and tropical dry forest.
“Our intent here is to create one of the most beautiful, lovable, and enjoyable places that man has ever built,” Brewer says of the development, in the Guanacaste region near the Liberia airport. “The market will support it. And the fact that we are creating a resort town, rather than a normal work-a-day town, I believe, frees us up from many of the constraints that typically hamper great place-making these days.”

AN ORGANIC MALL MAKEOVER
In England, the Prince’s Foundation was commissioned to do a master plan for parts of Walthamstow city center in North East London, including redevelopment of an existing shopping mall; expansion of retail onto an adjoining parcel; and infill development along the existing high street (main street) and town square.
As part of the undertaking, the Foundation had Seth Harry & Associates produce a plan for the redesign of the mall, and had the firm create designs for the expansion and for the high street, as well as an implementation strategy. Harry’s design allows the mall to add several large-format anchor tenants, thus competing better against suburban shopping centers. At the same time, the plan knits diverse pieces together “in a highly organic fashion,” provides “a range of distinctly unique merchandising environments” that should attract consumers, and generates several terminated vistas, Harry says.
One of the results is “ideal, high-value locations for key anchor tenants,” Harry explains. Another result is “a highly permeable specialty ‘market district’” linking the redeveloped mall to the high street shopping precinct. A functionally obsolete big box is to be reconfigured into a collection of specialty tenants, clustered around an urban plaza. These techniques should lead, Harry says, to “redevelopment of the existing mall structure into a seamlessly integrated, walkable, mixed-use downtown core.”
Irregular designs feel natural, Duany observes. “When you let people build stuff on their own, they tend to go organic.”
“We are starting to build up quite a little portfolio of these things,” Harry says of the organic projects in Central America. “And we’ve also created an interesting little group of planners in the process.”
He notes that in Central America, the planning proceeds proceeds quickly, as does the construction. “They can get built in a fraction of the time it takes things to get built out in the US,” says Harry, “and without many of the regulatory hurdles that we find in the US (mostly on the road/street level).”
This article is available in the October/November 2007 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.