Hercules, California, the former site of a

Hercules, California, the former site of a massive dynamite works, has grown from about 300 to 26,000 residents in the last quarter century. The conventional suburban municipality has no downtown. The geographical center of Hercules — land formerly used by the long-defunct factory — is now ripe for real estate development. Planning Commission chair Steve Lawton, an advocate of the New Urbanism, persuaded other public officials and developers that this historic opportunity should not be wasted on typical commercial strip malls. The town hired Dover Kohl & Partners to do a plan and “typological code” for the 426-acre heart of the city, a process which began with a charrette in June. The plan calls for four new neighborhoods, each with a distinctive character. The code matches street types with rules to regulate buildings so that they shape well-defined public spaces. It calls for the standardization of pedestrian-friendly street details. The 100-acre Waterfront Neighborhood (facing San Pablo Bay) already has a developer, the Bixby Company, that wants to move the project forward as a traditional neighborhood development.