People Habitat: 25 Ways to Think About Greener, Healthier Cities
People Habitat, Benfield, Island Press, 2014, all rights reserved
Note: This article appears in the March-April 2014 issue of Better! Cities & Towns.
A blog post by F. Kaid Benfield is always a welcome event. Since 2007, Benfield, a “self-taught urbanist” who grew up in Asheville, North Carolina, has written more than 1,000 posts for Switchboard, the blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council—an organization he served for years as a litigator.
To my mind, Benfield is one of the people who put the “smart” in smart growth. He helped establish the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system, and is now “special counsel for urban solutions” at NRDC’s Washington office. A vivid and reflective writer, he explores the “nooks and crannies” of communities rather than restricting himself to the drier realms of statistics and policies. Now, to the good fortune of readers, he has sifted through his accumulated writings, added some new material, and given us a collection of 25 essays—pieces that strike a judicious balance between urbanism and the imperatives of the natural environment.
The title of his book, People Habitat, alludes to the fact that just as plants and animals thrive only when they have an environment that suits their needs, people also require a supportive habitat. The kind of habitat that helps people flourish, he says, “begins in our homes” and “extends outward, to our neighborhoods, our cities or towns, and even to the regions beyond.”
Benfield focuses much of his attention on the neighborhood—the scale at which people most often interact with the world. In text and photos, he presents examples from many countries. In East Berlin, he finds lessons for urban development in a complex called Hackesche Höfe, which was built early in the 20th century and restored beginning in 1995. Hackesche Höfe, by architect August Endell, is organized around eight interlocking courtyards; each of them, Benfield observes, is “intimate and generally invisible from the others, so one passes through the outdoor spaces in much the way one might pass through rooms in a vintage house, each space harmonious with the others, but distinctive, too.”
A village in a city
Hackesche Höfe, Benfield says, is like a village in the city. And after the complex was restored, its business owners and tenants “worked out a scheme that requires that all restaurants and shops must be run by their owners,” Benfield points out. “In other words, no chain businesses.” (Pike Place Market in Seattle has operated under a similar rule.)
People Habitat, Benfield, Island Press, 2014, all rights reserved
Not everything called smart growth measures up to Benfield’s standards. Although Arlington, Virginia, has done an effective job of placing new offices, retail, and housing close to Metro rail stations—helping to revive a tired corridor and put thousands of workers and residents where they can get around without a car—Benfield shows a portion of Arlington’s development and labels it “a high-rise canyon without soul.” It appears to lack intimacy. Its architecture—at least what’s shown in the book—is not inspirational. He contrasts it to buildings in London and Japan that have “living walls,” abounding with vegetation.
Borrowing from the thinking of New Urbanist architect Steve Mouzon, Benfield argues that “places are sustainable only if they are also lovable.” One of the things that makes a place lovable, declares Benfield, is nature: “I believe nature has an intrinsic appeal for humans and, if we design density so that it brings more nature into communities, density could become far more appealing and popular.”
Trees matter. Little parks, tucked into neighborhoods, are greatly needed. “In cities,” he says, “the presence of nature—whether interspersed among our streets, buildings, and yards or organized into parks—connects us with growth and with the seasons, providing a softness to complement the concrete of our streets and sidewalks and the brick and wood of our houses.”
Another strong theme of People Habitat, it is that smart growth advocates must strive harder to include all the components of good placemaking and social well-being in their plans and projects. In his view, the smart-growth movement has strayed from some of its early aspirations.
“When originally conceived, smart growth was about much more than development and transportation reform,” he says. “It was also about conservation of land; bringing reinvestment to forgotten neighborhoods in a just, equitable way; preservation and adaptation of historic and cultural resources; and enhancement of environmental quality, to name just a few key goals. Many smart growth advocates remain supportive of these original values. But few of them, particularly at the national level that I know best, actually spend much time on them.”
On rare occasions, Benfield falls prey to a common mistake of bloggers who didn’t spend years being trained in the ins and outs of journalism: he doesn’t get all the facts. In discussing Southlands, an “agricultural urbanism” project that was proposed several years ago in Tsawwassen, British Columbia, he says the developer’s idea “was to justify encroaching on real farmland by saving remnants of the former farms for the new residents to enjoy.” He adds: “I don’t think that one was ever built.”
Readers shouldn’t have to wonder whether a project discussed in the text has been abandoned or not. I emailed several sources, including the planner, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co., and the developer, Century Group. It turns out that the 536-acre project won municipal approval last fall by a wide margin and is expected to be voted on within the next several months by Metro Vancouver, the regional planning authority. Southlands (see June 2008 New Urban News) may yet come to fruition, though its plan has been modified since DPZ’s 2008 charrette.
Such missteps, however, are infrequent in People Habitat. On the whole, people who care about the shaping of the built environment—from neighborhoods to regions—will find Benfield’s book stimulating and immensely readable. And more than that: wise.
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