Growing Denver
The Smart Way
The best way to smartly grow
a rapidly expanding metropolitan city for everyone
How is the problem currently being approached?
Some of the current approaches to helping reduce the issues caused by urbanization are for the local government to try and promote economic development and create jobs, maintain and create more affordable housing, implement alternative transport systems, upgrade energy use and integrate green spaces throughout the city.
What are some of the ideas?
Smart Growth has 10 basic principles for communities to follow when implementing these ideas. The principles give an outline to help maintain and improve upon the community by keeping the principles broad to implement but exact to see improvements. Some principles are, mix land use, create walkable neighborhoods, preserve open space, and encourage community and stakeholder collaboration in development.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA, helps communities follow a Smart Growth strategy in order to reduce pollution, increase human health, and improve economic conditions caused by urbanization. Smart Growth is a principle based “skeleton” for new development, whereas New Urbanism helps implement the ideals on a case by case basis.
Smart Growth
Started in the 1990s as an incentive policy by the government and Environmental Protection Agency, it is a theory on development and conservation strategies that help protect human health and natural environments. Smart Growth strives to make communities that are appealing, economically robust and socially diverse. Some of the strategies include reusing existing buildings, smartly designed neighborhoods close to amenities, ranges of housing types from apartments to senior living, involving residents in development decisions and increasing the quality of life through economically competitive business opportunities and local taxes.
New Urbanism
A development and urban design movement that promotes walkable city and town designs to be more environmentally friendly, increase population diversity, honor local history, and build a sense of community. Examples of New Urbanism designed cities are San Antonio, TX and Jersey City, NJ.
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New Urbanism designed cities and towns are meant to be “human-scale” where 5-minute walks from town centers to neighborhood edge are the standard. The streets are designed to be wide enough for humans, not just cars, to encourage walking and biking alongside cars. In larger cities, such as San Antonio, a master plan was implemented with these design thoughts, and the first new urbanist project has started construction. The Vicinia, built in a suburban area will have a housing mix to offer different age and income groups, have a walkable, bike-able and drivable layout and offer retail, office, and community facilities. It will also be the first Transit Oriented Development zoning code in San Antonio which encourages density near transit facilities.
Through design thinking like New Urbanism, the issues that urbanization poses can be reduced. With emphasis on local communities and walkability, air pollution caused by traffic can be reduced. Implementing more office spaces, mixed housing and retail spaces opens up job opportunities and helps reduce homelessness and poverty.
Jeff Speck's Walkability
Jeff Speck is a city planner and urban designer who specializes in walkability implementation into cities. He is a leader in the New Urbanism ideals and is currently working on implementing these ideals into multiple projects across the globe. In his book, Walkable City, he discusses the importance of walkability and the ten step process of implementing walkability into cities.
Walkability in cities is important because transportation costs have increased substantially and people are living further away from jobs, goods and services and other amenities, creating dependency on on cars.
Implementing walkability creates a more attractive city where people want to be. It creates a sense of fun, entertainment and quality of life.
Walkability is important for the health of citizens, if people are walking more it decreases obesity and increases overall health.
The video here is Jeff Speck speaking on the importance of walkable cities.
How should we think about the problem differently?
Reframing the Issue
For a long time cities in the United States have focused on creating cities for cars and industry, not people. We're seeing now that cities who have focused on increasing road size, implementing industrial areas, and planning for increased industrialization are not enjoyable for the citizens. Therefore, to look at the problems that urbanization creates we need to shift the focus away from cars and to people. How can we make cities more enjoyable, accessible and beautiful for the people?
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What are the next steps?
Incorporate Green Spaces
Creatively adding in green spaces to new developments can add a sense of environment and allow citizens to feel as if they are in nature within the city. This has shown to improve stress, improve air quality and noise reduction. Creative involvement has included ideas such as parklets, which are benches with greenery that extend the sidewalk and allow for people to sit and relax.
Fix Zoning
City design ideas like New Urbanism and Smart Growth incorporate lower income housing close to community centers. This allows for people to live within walking distance of a city center where jobs and amenities are close. This can help reduce joblessness, traffic and air pollution caused by traffic.
Focus on Community
Closing underutilized roads for walking, biking and overall community engagement reduces traffic, gives an incentive to walk or bike instead of drive and creates the opportunity to use that space to incorporate small neighborhood centers, more green spaces and community engagement.
Improve Design
Just like above, using better and more thought-out urban designs that incorporate the 21st century lifestyle with solutions to the problems that cities face, we can better develop the future of cities to work better. Designing neighborhoods with walkable businesses and amenities creates a sense of community within a large city. It gives the population of the city the feeling of a small town within the higher opportunistic city.