The Smart Growth Manual
ROBERT STEUTEVILLE JAN. 1, 2010
By Andres Duany and Jeff Speck with Mike Lydon
McGraw-Hill, 2009, 240 pp., $24.95 paperback
A lot of books deal with “smart growth” in one way or another. The Smart Growth Manual is, to the best of my knowledge, the only one that condenses principles of good design — from the building to the street, neighborhood, and regional scale — into a manual containing just enough information to get its ideas across, and not a word more.
The conciseness of this little paperback — its 240 pages measure just 5.5 by 8 inches — is a compelling virtue. Most of us are drowning in excess information. In The Smart Growth Manual, architect Andres Duany and urban planning consultant Jeff Speck, with help from writer, planner, and livable-streets activist Mike Lydon, focus on the essentials.
Each piece of advice, from “Replace No Growth with Good Growth” to “Design and locate civic buildings honorably,” is numbered and is explained in a single page consisting of a heading, a one-sentence statement, a photo, plan, or other image (with a caption), and one paragraph of text.
Here is the full text of principle 4.4, Celebrating High Points: “The high points of a site should be kept free of private development and reserved as public space or for civic buildings. Vistas to and from privileged places should not be privatized; only communal structures merit such exalted sites. Most complaints about hillside development refer not to the hillside, but to the hilltop, where private houses impinge on the natural skyline when seen from afar. As long as houses keep their roofs below the ridge, the visual damage is limited. But a well-designed civic building can enhance a hilltop with its bold silhouette.”
Introducing the fundamentals
What the authors say about how to respond to high points is probably already familiar to experienced new urbanist designers, but I’m sure it will come as a revelation to many others in the smart-growth field, including most environmentalists. The manual does an excellent job of introducing fundamentals of community-oriented design.
“Most of the items in this manual would benefit from a longer discussion than is offered,” the authors acknowledge. The quantity of design theory and documentation to support it is sharply limited by the book’s stripped-down format. So be it. Readers who want more will have no trouble finding longer or more specialized books. The great thing about The Smart Growth Manual is that it covers a lot of ground succinctly.
The very shape of the book is appealing; the pages have rounded corners, like a travel guide or an architectural guide that you’d carry around, taking it in and out of your pocket. No one will really use this manual that way, but the association is deft.
The manual bases smart growth on the traditional mixed use neighborhood. “It was the abandonment of this model in favor of novelties that led to the current crises — ecological, economic, and social — that make the smart growth campaign necessary,” the authors observe.
“There may be other, more creative ways to reorganize our national landscape, and many of these may be sustainable, but the neighborhood is the only one that has proved itself so, ten thousand times over.”
Learning from trial and error
“[A]fter more than 25 years of efforts, it is now possible to reach conclusions about what works,” Duany, Speck, and Lydon assert. Thus they place great emphasis on details of physical design — aspects that they say “are rarely addressed with specificity in the smart growth discussion.” An example is the authors’ mention of window mullions, which they point out “increase visual privacy for interiors, allowing dwellings to be closer together,” which in turn “increases density and creates more spatially intimate streets that encourage walking.” Walkable streets, in turn, mean less driving, fewer emissions, and therefore less climate change.
Such advice is pretty much common sense, yet it may sting some architects who indulge themselves with in-your-face tactics such as creating urban housing with large slabs of wholly unconcealed glass — a design conceit that sets up a conflict between urbanism and privacy. There are a lot of observations in this book that will provoke reactions. Manuals are usually inoffensive and dull. Not this one. Everything in it fits together, presenting a strong — and I think well-reasoned — point of view.
McGraw-Hill, 2009, 240 pp., $24.95 paperback
A lot of books deal with “smart growth” in one way or another. The Smart Growth Manual is, to the best of my knowledge, the only one that condenses principles of good design — from the building to the street, neighborhood, and regional scale — into a manual containing just enough information to get its ideas across, and not a word more.
The conciseness of this little paperback — its 240 pages measure just 5.5 by 8 inches — is a compelling virtue. Most of us are drowning in excess information. In The Smart Growth Manual, architect Andres Duany and urban planning consultant Jeff Speck, with help from writer, planner, and livable-streets activist Mike Lydon, focus on the essentials.
Each piece of advice, from “Replace No Growth with Good Growth” to “Design and locate civic buildings honorably,” is numbered and is explained in a single page consisting of a heading, a one-sentence statement, a photo, plan, or other image (with a caption), and one paragraph of text.
Here is the full text of principle 4.4, Celebrating High Points: “The high points of a site should be kept free of private development and reserved as public space or for civic buildings. Vistas to and from privileged places should not be privatized; only communal structures merit such exalted sites. Most complaints about hillside development refer not to the hillside, but to the hilltop, where private houses impinge on the natural skyline when seen from afar. As long as houses keep their roofs below the ridge, the visual damage is limited. But a well-designed civic building can enhance a hilltop with its bold silhouette.”
Introducing the fundamentals
What the authors say about how to respond to high points is probably already familiar to experienced new urbanist designers, but I’m sure it will come as a revelation to many others in the smart-growth field, including most environmentalists. The manual does an excellent job of introducing fundamentals of community-oriented design.
“Most of the items in this manual would benefit from a longer discussion than is offered,” the authors acknowledge. The quantity of design theory and documentation to support it is sharply limited by the book’s stripped-down format. So be it. Readers who want more will have no trouble finding longer or more specialized books. The great thing about The Smart Growth Manual is that it covers a lot of ground succinctly.
The very shape of the book is appealing; the pages have rounded corners, like a travel guide or an architectural guide that you’d carry around, taking it in and out of your pocket. No one will really use this manual that way, but the association is deft.
The manual bases smart growth on the traditional mixed use neighborhood. “It was the abandonment of this model in favor of novelties that led to the current crises — ecological, economic, and social — that make the smart growth campaign necessary,” the authors observe.
“There may be other, more creative ways to reorganize our national landscape, and many of these may be sustainable, but the neighborhood is the only one that has proved itself so, ten thousand times over.”
Learning from trial and error
“[A]fter more than 25 years of efforts, it is now possible to reach conclusions about what works,” Duany, Speck, and Lydon assert. Thus they place great emphasis on details of physical design — aspects that they say “are rarely addressed with specificity in the smart growth discussion.” An example is the authors’ mention of window mullions, which they point out “increase visual privacy for interiors, allowing dwellings to be closer together,” which in turn “increases density and creates more spatially intimate streets that encourage walking.” Walkable streets, in turn, mean less driving, fewer emissions, and therefore less climate change.
Such advice is pretty much common sense, yet it may sting some architects who indulge themselves with in-your-face tactics such as creating urban housing with large slabs of wholly unconcealed glass — a design conceit that sets up a conflict between urbanism and privacy. There are a lot of observations in this book that will provoke reactions. Manuals are usually inoffensive and dull. Not this one. Everything in it fits together, presenting a strong — and I think well-reasoned — point of view.
