Robert Davis looks at the ‘agricultural edge’

Now that his Seaside, Florida, development is well established, Robert Davis is focusing much of his attention on two distinct parts of the world environment: the “urban room” and the “agricultural edge.” In 2002, Davis, Raymond Gindroz of Urban Design Associates, and European architect Leon Krier founded the Seaside Pienza Institute for Town Building and Land Stewardship. Each year, the Institute invites an interdisciplinary group to meet in beautiful places — twice so far in the Italian town of Pienza and once in London and Bath, England — to study compelling towns or cities and to think about landscapes. The discussions among urban designers, planners, developers, environmentalists, government officials, academics, and others have considered how to create urban rooms, how to connect city dwellers to nature, and how to foster a healthy agricultural domain. Prince Charles’s Poundbury development, which the group visited in September, has a sharp edge where the town ends and the green agricultural landscape begins. The British government, which allowed extensive out-of-town retail development in the 1980s, is now attempting to concentrate building within urban areas and on brownfield sites and trying to discourage the loss of green land on the periphery. One of the hopes of the Seaside Pienza Institute is that Americans, too, will find ways of preserving agriculture near cities and towns. This may require methods of boosting the value of what the farmers produce — thus increasing the economic incentives to keep land in agriculture rather than covering it with housing tracts. In the San Francisco Bay Area, an emphasis on fresh, high-quality food has helped generate a lively urban restaurant culture and at the same time helped support organic farmers. Said Shelley Poticha of the Center for Transit-Oriented Development: “The challenge is to bring forward the New Urbanism and the New Ruralism to the same degree.”