Alexandria, Virginia (Suburban Nation)
After all of these conversations, I had to learn a little more about the suburbs. Sure, I grew up in and rode my bike all over ‘em as kid, studying them with an untrained eye – but I never studied the suburbs beyond their place in US and economic history. I asked some city planners and MIT researchers where to start, and I wound up walking back from the library with an armful of books.
I’ve been reading this great little one called Suburban Nation by Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck. The authors are experienced practitioners who strike an irreverent tone; the footnotes are a joy. There’s a passage that contrasts Virginia Beach with Alexandria, VA, a city that was partially designed by a seventeen-year-old George Washington, who was then an assistant to the county surveyor. Alexandria follows six fundamental rules that, according to the authors, “distinguish it from sprawl:”
1. The center. Each neighborhood has a clear center, focused on the common activities of commerce, culture, and governance. This is downtown Alexandria, understood by residents and tourists alike as a unique place to visit and engage in civilized society.
2. The five-minute walk. A local resident is rarely more than a five-minute walk from the ordinary needs of daily life: living, working, and shopping. In the downtown, these three activities may be found in the same building. By living so close to all that they need, Alexandria’s residents can drive much less, if they have to drive at all.
3. The street network. Because the street pattern takes the from of a continuous web—in this case, a grid—numerous paths connect one location to another. Blocks are relatively small, rarely exceeding a quarter mile in perimeter. In contrast to suburbia, where walking routes are scarce and traffic is concentrated on a small number of highways, the traditional network provides the pedestrian and the driver with a choice. This condition is not only more interesting but more useful. A person who lives in Alexandria is able to adjust her path minutely to and from work on a daily basis, to drop off a child at daycare, pick up the dry cleaning, or visit a coffeehouse. If she chooses to drive, she can constantly alter her route—at every intersection if necessary—to avoid heavy traffic.
4. Narrow, versatile streets. Because there are so many streets to accommodate the traffic, each street can be small. Of all the streets pictured [in the downtown segment], only one is more than two lanes wide. This slows down the traffic, as does the parallel parking along the curb, resulting in a street that is pleasant and safe to walk along. This pedestrian-friendly environment is enhanced by wide sidewalks, shade trees, and buildings close to the street. Traditional streets, like all organic systems, are extremely complex, in contrast to the artificial simplicity of sprawl. On Alexandria’s streets, cars drive and park while people walk, enter buildings, meet, converse under trees, and even dine at sidewalk cafés. In Virginia Beach, only one thing happens on the street: cars moving. There is no parallel parking, no pedestrians, and certainly no trees. Like many state departments of transportation, Virginia discourages its state roads from being lined with trees, which are considered dangerous. In fact, they are not called trees at all but FHOs: Fixed and Hazardous Objects.
5. Mixed Use. In contrast to sprawl’s single-use zoning, almost all of downtown Alexandria’s blocks are of mixed use, as are many of the buildings. Despite this complexity, it is not a design free-for-all. All of the above characteristics are the intended consequence of a town plan with carefully prescribed details. There is an essential discipline regarding two factors: the size of the building and its relationship to the street. Large buildings sit in the company of other large buildings, small buildings sit along other small buildings, and so on. This organization is a form of zoning, but buildings are arranged by their physical type more often than by their use. When buildings of different size do adjoin, they still collaborate to define the space on the street, usually by pulling right up against the sidewalk. Parking lots, if any, are hidden at the back. In those rare cases where a building sits back from the sidewalk, it does so in order to create a public plaza or garden, not a parking lot.
6. Special sites for special buildings. Finally, traditional neighborhoods devote unique sites to civic buildings, those structures that represent the collective identity and aspirations of the community. Alexandria’s City Hall sits back from the street on a plaza, the site of a thriving farmers’ market on Sundays. Even within a fairly uniform grid, schools, places of worship, and other civic buildings are located in positions that contribute to their prominence. In this way, the city achieves a physical structure that both manifests and supports its social structure.
I think about these streets and the layout, and I look to Georgetown a little further north of our studied example. I can’t point to a clearly defined “center” —perhaps the university or M Street—but that’s because I’m not so familiar with it. Everything’s within a five-minute walk (except the metro), the street network is a tight grid of mixed uses, and special buildings—like libraries and schools—sit back from the street. I want to study Georgetown and Alexandria more while looking for towns that embody these six fundamentals in Florida and New England.
