Adaptive development: Designing a neighbourhood with humans in mind
Hendrick Farm built to encourage social connection through community
It is an unavoidable truth: Home ownership matters to Canadians. Close to 70 per cent of us own the home in which we live, and over 85 per cent of millennials — the largest up-and-coming population group — view home ownership as important. Between them, baby boomers and millennials make up well over half of the Canadian population. So why aren’t we designing or building neighbourhoods that meet their needs?
Most Canadian cities suffer from urban sprawl, which is central to the inefficient use of land, energy and water, and results in increased air/water pollution and loss of green spaces and natural habitats. Neighbourhoods continue to be built that require a car to reach any kind of destination — from the local coffee shop to work — and Canadians waste years of their life stuck in traffic.
Millennials and baby boomers are seeking neighbourhoods that are designed with diverse, compact, walkable urbanism in mind. They want built form that provides stimulation and convenience. This means they can walk to the movie theatre, hop on a bus to get to work, and maybe even bike to their nearest grocery store. Developers and city planners must begin looking at our cities and neighbourhoods through a 21st-century lens. When one thinks of Miami, for example, “good planning” doesn’t immediately jump to mind. Maybe it should.
Since the early 2000s, the city of Miami has been experiencing some of the fastest growth in its history. A traditionally car-dependent, usage-segregated, sprawling city, it approached one of the world’s premier urban planning firms, DPZ Partners, to help reshape the city’s future. Enter form-based code. Traditional zoning segregates cities by usage — residents are expected to live here, work there and play way over there. This is why many of our cities no longer appeal to their largest demographics; they are a huge waste of human time due to their built-in car dependency.
Together with DPZ Partners, Miami introduced form-based code to replace its land-use-based zoning code. Form-based code offers land development regulations that use physical form as its organizing principle. It addresses the relationship between building facades and the public realm, the relationship of a building’s form and mass, and the scale and types of streets and the resulting blocks. It results in cities where you can work and play in the same neighbourhood. It is the difference between a street like La Rambla in Barcelona, and Sparks Street in Ottawa. Formbased code results in a cohesive, walkable city with character.
Dubbed Miami 21 (as a true vision of a 21st-century city), Miami’s new code has transformed the way the city manages zoning, economic development, transportation, historic preservation, green spaces and open spaces. It encourages continued growth and investment while simultaneously ensuring walkability, healthy interaction between public and private spaces, and preservation of green spaces.
It’s time for the National Capital Region to move into the 21st century as well. Why not be at the forefront of a shift in the way we approach urban planning and infill? Landlab is leading the charge with Canada’s first adaptive development. Built entirely on form-based code, Landlab’s Hendrick Farm project is changing the way we approach housing developments.
The principles of adaptive development include listening to the land, listening to the market, designing for place, creating social spaces, scaling to surroundings, mixing uses, protecting architectural consistency, ensuring frontages interact with streetscapes, integrating the site with its surrounding, and building for people first and cars second.
How does this play out in the context of a neighbourhood? The roads in an adaptive development are designed with human views in mind. This not only slows down car traffic, but makes the neighbourhood more walkable. Because the eye can only see so far down the road, the human brain deems distances to be shorter than they are, and thus increases the appeal of walking. Houses include front porches, garages have been detached and re-situated on rear laneways, and the homes have been brought to within a metre of the sidewalk. This completely alters the sociability of the neighbourhood. Front porches close to the road provide a social connection between the homes and the community, detached garages ensure interactions among neighbours, and rear laneways ensure most traffic is moved off the main streets. A village centre is within walking distance, so homeowners can walk to coffee shops, restaurants and shops — and, in the case of Hendrick Farm, an on-site organic farm provides a connection with local agriculture.
Healthy, vibrant, walkable cities are not only possible, they are essential to the health of people, their environment and, more broadly, to the economy. It’s time city planners and developers start giving the people what they want.