Mouzon: California Forever is true sustainability, not hype
Architect and urban designer Steve Mouzon, author of The Original Green and a prominent New Urbanist, posted a lengthy piece this week endorsing California Forever, the plan for a new city between Sacramento and San Francisco. Mouzon explains how California Forever aligns with every principle that he has been promoting over the years.
“The most fascinating thing to me about California Forever is that everything in their Specific Plan leads toward the Original Green,” says Mouzon. “I don't know if they knew, or if they just instinctively took those steps and set up those goals, but this is where it leads: to real, enduring sustainability, not just marketing fluff.”
Mouzon compares California Forever to other plans to create new cities, which may look good from “bird’s-eye view,” but fall apart once you start drilling down to how people will experience the urbanism at street level.
“California Forever stands tall above the rest. If you haven’t heard of it, California Forever is a proposal to build a new walkable city for up to 400,000 people in Solano County, an hour north of San Francisco/Silicon Valley, anchored with a manufacturing park and a shipyard. I've been digging deep ever since the first mention I saw on New Media, and it is now clear that California Forever's words and images are a strong match, unlike every other new city proposal I've seen published for sites in the US.”
I wrote in detail about California Forever’s plan in December. “The plan is New Urbanism on a scale that we haven’t seen before. Large New Urbanist developments have been built, like former airports Central Park (formerly Stapleton) in Denver, and Mueller in Austin, and the Daybreak project on reclaimed mining land in South Jordan, Utah. California Forever is approximately an order of magnitude bigger.”
I was most impressed with the grid of streets, with blocks similar in shape and size to those in Chicago, because I think the most important thing that we lost in the mid-20th Century was the master street plan. California Forever proposes a sophisticated street grid on the scale of 19th Century cities. Andres Duany called it a “tartan grid” that proposes a hierarchy of A, B, and C streets for transit and citywide traffic, bicycles and pedestrians, and local traffic.
Mouzon, on the other hand, is more impressed by the small details. Despite the scale of the project, California Forever takes an approach more typical of a smaller development, Mouzon concludes. “The fundamental choice at the beginning of planning a new place is whether the highest measure should be standard of living or quality of life. Bigger or better. Buying more or loving more. Consuming or sustaining. Right from the start, California Forever has chosen quality of life as their highest measure, and it's clear that this first choice has influenced every other choice which follows. Well done!”
This is a strong endorsement for California Forever, which remains highly controversial locally, not surprising given its size and the difficulty of building in the Golden State. It would nearly double Solano County’s population over 40 years. The developers are seeking approval through annexation by the nearby city of Suisun City, which currently has about 30,000 residents.
Nothing on this scale has been seriously proposed in California, or pretty much anywhere else in the US for that matter, since the 1960s. In that decade, Irvine, California, began construction as a “new town,” and now has a population of 318,000. If approved, California Forever could establish a model for building new, walkable, sustainable cities at scale. But it remains to be seen whether the plan will be tied up in entitlement and legal issues for years—that would be the outcome if recent decades are any indication.
