An interesting article on the future of the prototypical edge city, Tysons Corner, Virginia. I recall similar proposals on this site for Jacksonville's Southpoint region.
QuoteSome 120,000 people work in Tysons Corner, Va., but only 17,000 live there. To transform this hotbed of suburban gridlock into a green, walkable city, a soon-to-be-adopted plan-as envisioned by our artist-calls for as much as tripling the current square footage by expanding upward, with the tallest buildings located next to four new train stations, which should be completed by 2013.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1904187,00.html (http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1904187,00.html)
Great article, and a great example of retrofitting suburbia.
Also, everyone should notice that this is a case of private developers attempting to strip away all the government regulations and policy decisions that created the sprawl in the first place.
Too often, people on both the left and the right like to spread the myth that sprawl is the result of "unregulated" growth. In reality, sprawl is heavily regulated, and indeed created, by government policy. It's nice to see at least one town where the private sector has gotten frustrated enough to fight the sprawl.
But also notice the homeowners who oppose this urbanization plan! This is another way that government creates sprawl. NIMBY's serve as special interest groups which pressure city councils to inappropriately distort the market by banning high density development. Then the same people often have the nerve to complain about "greedy developers" who start building sprawl!!
IMO, our own Southpoint area could adopt a similar approach and reap the benefits of becomming a livible neighborhood instead of an office park. Actually, because it resides within the city limits, Southpoint may have a much easier time accomplishing this.
I agree, Jason.
In fact, when comparing aerial shots on GoogleEarth or WindowsLive, it's clear that Southpoint and even Tinsletown are much better suited for an urban conversion than Tyson's Corner.
While Tysons is an absolute jumble of freeways, by comparison, Southpoint already has rudimentary connectivity and plenty of obvious sites for infill.
If Tysons can succeed with their plan, Soutpoint could certainly become a 2nd "downtown" if only the political will ever manifests itself. (I doubt it will, though).
You doubt?! :o Aw, come on. I know that this city will manifest itself. No doubt on my mind. 8)
Who wants to stop it? Let them all choke on each others exhaust. I am sitting pretty in Avondale and could care less.
Screw Southpoint! That is throwing more sprawl money after original sprawl. How is that a solution to sprawl?!?! Any focus on a Tyson's-type of program would have to be the core.
Imho, there were too many warped thinkers like this at the First Coast Reality Check exercise, too. Table after table I saw people following that same train of thought: "Oh look, there is a bunch of yellow (residential) out here and no red (commercial). Let's put some red out here where the yellow is."
I call this warped thinking because it is the result of a bunch of suburbanites who bought into the residential sprawl in the first place, and now think they want business to follow them out there to create a bunch of un-linked, faux "town center" islands in the region. That exercise was so painful to watch, I barely made it to the results session.
Throwing good planning (the Tyson's solution) after bad (the initial sprawl/Southpoint) is just stupid.
So the bad planning in LaVilla and Brooklyn (massive demolition and the allowance of suburban style development) should not be followed by good urban minded planning?
Southpoint and Downtown will likely compete forever more. Jacksonville has a buit-in ability, due to consoloditation, to allow both areas to grow smartly. Although the areas are inherently different, there is no reason both can't grow with more focus on urban minded development and ammenities. If the downtown overlay caould reap the benefits of a couple tweaks to weed out the bad development then why can't Southpoint do something similar? Remember, unlike Tysons, the downtown and southpoint are both part of the same city and their success and/or failure affects us all.
Quote from: Jason on June 17, 2009, 12:40:02 PM
IMO, our own Southpoint area could adopt a similar approach and reap the benefits of becomming a livible neighborhood instead of an office park. Actually, because it resides within the city limits, Southpoint may have a much easier time accomplishing this.
The gridlock is not as bad as Tysons Corner, but it's pretty awful. When I worked in Southpoint and drove during the mass exodus every afternoon it could take 30 minutes to get to JTB from parts of the park.
I used to hate when I had to drive through Tyson's corner for something.
Now here's a truly radical way to stop sprawl (of a slightly different kind):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/01/rio-slums-walls-deforestation
Here's a good article on the issue of what Flint and other cities are doing
http://citiwire.net/post/1007/