At Project for Public Spaces, our approach to creating anti-sprawl, community-building places involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people in a community. We learn about their problems and aspirations, and work with them to create a vision around the places they view as important, both to community life and their daily experience. We then help them to implement their ideas, beginning with short-term, often experimental improvements that can quickly add value to a place while demonstrating its future potential. Our experience has consistently shown that if the community is asked to define its problems from the start - rather than merely review a solution to an externally defined problem - the process becomes meaningful and efficient.

The outcomes of this approach are many and varied:

More traditional approaches to eliminating sprawl include land use plans, land preservation through acquisition, growth boundaries and development of new traditional neighborhoods. These tools are important, but they bring us only halfway to a solution. As writer Jane Holtz Kay said, "For all the far-flung new-towning, it is old-towning we need." This "old-towning" must start at the basic, human-scale, daily life level: the street corner or transit plaza, a neighborhood park or downtown main street. Improvements at this micro level - the establishment of public markets selling local products, redesigned streets, rejuvenated parks - are the essential yeast for rebuilding those sprawl-contrary "old town" communities.

One of the most important things we can do to combat sprawl is to reclaim our existing communities and rejuvenate public environments.

What are the substantial obstacles we face in re-building our communities?

In combating sprawl, one of the most important things we can do is reclaim our existing communities and rejuvenate crucial public environments. By restoring a basic people-friendly infrastructure, creating walkability and attractiveness and promoting "mixed-use" activities - living, working, playing - we can create communities where people want to be. It's a much more livable alternative to the search for "greener pastures" that turn out to be not so green - or great - after all.

Resources

Smart Growth and Sprawl www.smartgrowth.org
The concept of Smart Growth stems from an increasing awareness that growth and development, although inevitable, can be channeled to contain sprawl. In this view, growth, rather than being cut off completely, needs to be planned from the bottom up and balanced within a regional context. This requires the recognition that development can be economically viable and at the same time protect the environment, promote livability, and preserve open space and natural resources. It also requires government policies that support this view, such as regulations that allow for greater density, brownfield development, recycling of existing infrastructure and development of transportation alternatives. The Smart Growth Network, by bringing together national, regional and local coalitions, is building an alliance of diverse stakeholders who can effect Smart Growth change in their own communities and coalesce to broadly influence new directions in public policy.

Other links:

SprawlWatch

Sierra Club Challenge to Sprawl Campaign

Sprawl-Busters

Sprawl Guide from Planning Commissioners Journal

Sprawl Net

Sprawl City

EPA's "Antidotes to Sprawl"

PBS Store Wars: Sprawl

Walmart Watch

 

 

The third article in a series.

Other issue papers:

Safety & Security in Public Space

Health and Community Design


Looking for strategies to combat sprawl? Browse through these PPS publications and videos:

How to Turn a Place Around

Getting Back to Place

The Role of Transit in Creating Livable Metropolitan Communities

How Transportation and Community Partnerships are Shaping America

Cities Back from the Edge
By Roberta Gratz and Norman Mintz

Placemaking: An Antidote to Sprawl


Home | Contact Us | Online Store
Copyright © 2001 Project for Public Spaces, Inc.
153 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10014
Problems? Questions? Comments? Email us:
pps@pps.org