This week we’re undertaking a design charrette in Ottawa, KS as a master plan for Ottawa University. OU is a small, but growing, college, and this plan is being done anticipating growth to about 1,500 students over the next decade. We’re on a team with Gould Evans Associates. We’ll try and post some images from the charrette later this week.

The project is an update to a master plan we completed for the university in 2003. At that time, however, the university anticipated a size of about 750 students as a maximum student population. Now, with a new president and strategic plan in place, the campus is poised to grow to 1,500 students. This puts the previous master plan in a completely different perspective, as the facilities will have to grow well beyond the current capacity. So, we will be looking at long-term (and some short-term) solutions for residential space, academic space, parking/circulation, campus open space and more.

Gould Evans is developing a detailed residential program as well as a program for the Learning Commons (union, library and more combined). The effort this week is to coalesce most of the work into a long-term physical vision for the campus, and we’ll then work out the details over the next month. The near-term goal is to start a first phase residential building in the next few months.

There’s one aspect of Anthony Bourdain’s television show “No Reservations” that I always connect with – I’m a big fan of street food. And not just for the obvious reasons of quick, cheap and sometimes really tasty meals.

More than anything, I like street food because, well, it gets people out on the street. And if we step back from all the beautiful renderings of attractive buildings and street scenes in our development plans, isn’t that the bottom line for what we want – life on the street?

It seems we have a constant tension in our communities between doing the things that actually create life and vibrancy and a desire to “tame” that, or at least pretty it up. In most cases, I’d urge us to let loose the reigns a bit, and allow more spontaneity in the street scene. Food carts, mobile trucks, etc. all fall into this category. I remember in my own city that at least one city councilman wanted to essentially eliminate most sidewalk operations downtown or corral them into a few designated areas. But good cities, (and by good I mean places where people actually walk) are not sterile mall food courts. The best places encourage these sorts of start-up operations as a means to encouraging other forms of business and to add local color and flavor.

In these times of tighter money, it’s also good to consider the other benefits of street food operations – they are cheap to start up (entrepreneurial), they can hide ugly parking lots in the short-term (aesthetic), they get people outside and visible (seeds the urban market), they are small enough that a few in a row can relieve monotony (creates pedestrian interest).

So, as you think about ways to take first steps in your walkable areas, please consider the value of street food operations. Review your ordinances and procedures to see what kind of burdens are placed on these operations. Remember the golden rule of community planning – make the good stuff easy to do.

Admittedly it’s a working title, but as we have worked in communities all across the U.S., it’s clear that what so many places are seeking is simple economic development. And why is that – why the relentless search for more growth, more revenue, more employment?

The simple answer is – most of our places simply cannot afford to maintain the infrastructure we have built and need new revenue sources to keep up the illusion.

Over the last 30 years there have literally been countless studies showing that our typical built pattern of low-density suburban sprawl does not pay for itself. In other words, this pattern is too inefficient to generate enough revenue to cover the municipal services that people expect. And so, cities and other government agencies tend to pursue a variety of actions:

1. Zoning out lower and middle-income development in favor of high-end only (increased property taxes)
2. Reducing citizen services
3. Increasing taxes and fees
4. Chasing every new development that can generate revenue, regardless of long-term plans

All of these are earnest attempts to try and balance short-term needs with the current development pattern. The problem, though, is how destructive these approaches are to long-term sustainability. We need to change the pattern.

And so, this series will focus in 2 primary areas: how we can focus on the long-term health of our communities, and some short-term techniques we can try now to take steps in the right direction. Long-term strategic thinking and short-term actions is another way to say it.

It’s certainly our opinion that the primary way back to prosperity for many of our communities is to change the development pattern. Compact, mixed use, walkable neighborhoods are not just a lifestyle choice – they are inherently more stable over the long term, and far more efficient to serve. By no means does this imply that every neighborhood has to become high-rise. In fact, some of our best examples are the normal, “boring” neighborhoods from the late 19th century through the early 20th century. You probably know an example or two in your own community – they mix single family homes with apartments, narrow streets, neighborhood shops and community buildings.

So in the coming weeks we’ll share examples, thoughts, techniques and more to hopefully provoke some thinking. Please feel free to give us feedback on anything that is shared – we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

Here’s a look at the vibrant downtown of Traverse City, Michigan.

I wanted to share this link to a story that ran Sunday on the Kansas City Star’s webpage, KansasCity.com:

It’s interesting and sad to me that the only primary opposition to plans like these come from the Sierra Club. Where are our business groups, urban real estate interests, economic development agencies, etc. in this debate? The plan as promoted is frankly an outrageous misallocation of federal and state dollars – literally spending multiple billions on an outmoded idea that will not increase prosperity for our communities in Missouri. The only direct benefits are to the heavy contractors and large engineering firms that would see years of make-work. I have no beef with them – they are working in their own self-interest, though they could certainly also make money on projects that actually provide long-term benefits to our communities.

Instead, it’s more bothersome that our own business concerns don’t have a problem with such wastefulness. For the money that will be spent on this, we could build entire transit systems for Kansas City, St Louis, and some smaller cities in Missouri. And, those systems would serve to benefit our citizens far more in a world of diminishing energy resources. By the time such a reconstruction would be complete, it’s entirely possible there won’t even be a trucking industry as we know it today. As oil supplies diminish and costs rise, more and more freight will have to be moved on rail, not by diesel trucks. On top of the economic benefits, the idea that “truck only” lanes are a safety feature is truly bizarre. It’s right up there with the idea that wider traffic lanes on city streets are safer, when the opposite has been proved time and time again. These are not ideas grounded in any kind of good science.

We often wonder why, even though we are a wealthy country, we seem so short on money for things like transit operations, road & bridge repairs, school maintenance, sewer upgrades, etc. It’s precisely because of projects like this, which spend so much of our public dollars on one foolish big-ticket item, with no return on that investment. It’s time to re-order our priorities if we are to be competitive in the coming decades.

This is an excellent article written by Jebediah Reed of The Infrastructurist about how Dutch-style roads could save 22,000 lives each year in the US.