Common Place

Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design By Douglas S. Kelbaugh, University of Washington Press, 1997. Softcover, 334 pp., $35. Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design should be used as a work book — a treatise to be underlined, highlighted and noted. If your library is relatively neat, you may need two copies of this book; one for its technical merits as a work book, the other for your reception room so that others can see the light. Kelbaugh has synthesized two decades of intense personal concentration on mending/creating urban villages and pedestrian pockets into a clear description of traditional town planning and neighborhood development. He even provides insights on how to organize and conduct a charrette, as well as the costs for follow-up documentation (approximately $5,000 to $15,000). Common Place is the first book written for design professional and other diverse charrette participants which combines a good dose of theory (Part 1), design (Part 2), and policy (Part 3). Kelbaugh presents planning and design philosophies aimed toward restoring a human-scaled, humane, and formally coherent sense of public and private place to American neighborhoods, towns and cities (before they dissolve into endless sprawl). He provides a balanced content of what generally makes a sustainable neighborhood, along with the details on the typical size of such a neighborhood (approximately 150 acres). The University of Washington Professor of Architecture and Urban Design weaves key elements of neighborhood and regional design into a specific fabric for Seattle and environs. Through charrettes and studio work, Kelbaugh explains how his theories pertaining to the costs of sprawl, critical regionalism, topology, and the New Urbanism relate to the Puget Sound area. He identifies these relationships after providing the reader with a clear sense of what makes a livable, sustainable, and affordable community on the national level. Common Place also is the first book that explains the current vision, values, goals and character of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) and balances this with the criticism lodged against the New Urbanism. Kelbaugh indicates what is new about the New Urbanism is its totality and how it attempts to promote a unified design theory for an entire region — from buildings, blocks and streets to regional infrastructure and ecology. Kelbaugh also distinguishes what is fresh about the New Urbanism — its advocates insist that physical placemaking must be carefully and thoroughly linked to public policy. He claims that new urbanists have been more effective than their predecessors at reforming municipal, state and federal policies. Kelbaugh points out that urban villages, traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) and transit-oriented developments (TODs) are superior in economic, social, environmental and urban design terms to the prevailing models of conventional suburban development. One of the interesting insights is how urban and suburban problems have reached a common ground. Kelbaugh writes: “Before suburbia was visited by decaying infrastructure, noise, crime, gridlock, and low-paying jobs, there was little upper middle class concern for these issues.” Now there is a confluence of interests which offers an historic opportunity to address such issues. The principal in Kelbaugh, Calthorpe & Associates in Seattle ends by outlining seven urgent policy initiatives for the region: l) Get development priorities right; 2) Get automobiles under control; 3) Get transit on track; 4) Get planning; 5) Get more granny flats; 6) Get funding right; and 7) Get governance right. He also describes the consequences of not acting. So, this reviewer adds 8) Get the book.