Highlights, so far. (Day 1 of NPSG)

Tonight I met Andres Duany.

For those of you who aren't big planning dorks, if there is such a thing as a celebrity of the planning world, Andres Duany is definitely it. He has his share of skeptics, which I believe is part backlash but partly warranted as well (even his friends, as I witnessed today, take his manner with a grain of salt), but after getting the chance to listen to a portion of a session he gave today on SmartCode, I'm further convinced that he is an extremely intelligent, innovative person who continues to contribute immensely to the field of planning. He's also hilarious.

He's most famous for this book, and he's often touted as the father of New Urbanism, though many, including him, acknowledge that theorists and planners such as Jane Jacobs, were champions for integral aspects of New Urbanist design long before the Charter for New Urbanism was founded or New Urbanism enjoyed the popularity it has today. But he is mostly responsible for how popular New Urbanism has become, and the new trend against suburban sprawl---and maybe it takes a charismatic, unshamedly market-driven individual who also happens to be brilliant to start a trend like that. My boss Bill is an old friend and when he realized that Duany was speaking today, he told me to leave the training and watch it, which I did for as long as I could (until just before the training wrapped up, and I had to get back).

Apparently Duany is always at odds with some group at some point in his career, and that group is currently environmentalists--which makes it all the more interesting that he was speaking at a smart growth conference, since smart growth is almost primarily about environmentalism. His explanation of SmartCode touched on how environmentalism is sometimes incompatible with his work because it hinders what he is trying to accomplish, that being high density development with an "unclipped" grid as he put it. Because when you put great effort into preserving certain habitats and wildlife corridors, you put gaps in your grid and you have to "clip" your roads. From what I could gather, he was arguing that "clipping" your roads leads to multilaned thoroughfares that limits space for buildings which limits residential density. He kept using Manhattan as an example of an extremely dense (ostensibly desirable) neighborhood that could not have been achieved if, for instance, you daylighted some or all the streams in the area instead of piping them. Similar examples included Barcelona and Charleston. My initial internal responses to these examples was 1) Granted, we have to assume cars are in the equation, but it doesn't seem very New Urbanist to let your design be driven by them and 2) Manhattan is a far cry from the neighborhoods DPZ (Duany Plater Zyberk, the company Duany runs with his wife, where my boss used to work in the 80s) are most famous for designing, such as Seaside, FL. This also seems to be one of the contentions his critics have with him.

Over all, though, and unsurprisingly, his discussion of SmartCode and how to adapt it to a transect of the city you are developing code for made a lot of sense. Obviously environmental regulations are not one-size-fits-all, and you have to decide when the environmental value of having high density, and thus preserving space, exceeds other desirable but incompatible environmental safeguards. Duany's over all argument was that you need to adapt your code (i.e. what you allow to be built where) not only to your city in particular, but to different areas in your city, i.e. yes, daylight your streams in rural or suburban areas but not necessarily in places where high density is desired, for instance the urban center. End message being you have to sacrifice or relax your environmental standards when appropriate (and of course he added, because you're not going to achieve your highest standard anyway). I can see why this would be hard to swallow for people who believe it's impossible to reach too high when it comes to environmental standards (being any environmentalist worth their salt).

Though New Urbanism doesn't seem as revolutionary to me now as it did 4 years ago when I first read Suburban Nation and it was all I knew of planning, it was still exciting to meet the author of the book that made me want to become a planner in the first place. The fact that he's an old friend and colleague of my boss and Board Emeritus of the organization I work for makes me feel like I've almost come full circle, and I appreciate this job even more. Seeing him speak was both fascinating and inspiring, and gave me the satisfying feeling that I was in the right place and on the right track, that this is indeed what I want to do with my life.