City The Stranger News Department Suggests
posted by on February 6 at 16:13 PM
The Friends of Seattle kickoff party, from 6 to 8 tonight at Twist, 2313 First Ave. in Belltown. Friends of Seattle is a new group that promotes the kind of progressive urbanist vision that the 52-year-old arts and urban planning advocacy group Allied Arts used to champion. (They lost that crown when they supported the mayor’s 13-block cut-and-cover tunnel on the waterfront.) From FoS’s vision statement:
Our principles are inspired in part by the New Urbanism movement and the Ahwahnee Principles for Resource Efficient Communities. Embrace progress, growth, and development, provided that these forces are properly harnessed to meet the needs and aspirations of the public.
Make waste reduction, energy conservation, and minimization of global warming-causing emissions central goals of community design.
Value and promote neighborhoods where people of mixed backgrounds are able to live together, as defined by income, profession, ethnicity, culture, age, and other qualities.
Establish zoning rules that permit enough housing to be developed to accommodate population growth.
Design communities so that the location of buildings and the way they relate to the street encourage pedestrian activity throughout the day.
Make public transit, not highways, the core transportation infrastructure for managing the regions growth and development.
Develop enough parks so that any resident can easily walk to a park or public gathering space.
I have absolutely no clue what the Ahwahnee Principles for Resource Efficient Communities are, but I do know FoS is the first local political group to really embrace this kind of truly green, urbanist vision in a long, long time. (They’re also for the surface/transit option). The party’s free, but 10 bucks gets you a FoS membership and an “exciting free FoS cocktail.” We’re going. You should too.
link?
www.friendsofseattle.org
http://www.lgc.org/ahwahnee/principles.html
Seems pretty straightforward, and something most Stranger readers would be in favor of. I can see this as a solid framework for city planning, and I bet Peter Steinbrueck loves it.
Is there a less successful movement, that has betrayed its principles more, in the past fifty years than New Urbanism? Have you SEEN what they've actually accomplished on the ground? Have you seen Northwest Landing down in Dupont (north of Tacoma on I-5, classic sprawl territory)? It's everything we should be fighting against, not plotting to flatten downtown for.
I really wanted to go but campus drama involving Votes of No Confidence and my parliamentary procedure-nerd side prevented me; I sent the girlfriend in my stead. I can't wait to see what direction they take as time goes on!
New Urbanism is what yuppies do before they sell out and try to shove unpaid overpriced underwater tunnels down our throats.
I haven't read that document either, but I'd just like to say as a former Allied Arts board member for two and a half years (2002-2005) that other than a couple of idealistic holdouts on that board (who? Davidya Kasperczyk and Phil Wohlstetter, if they are still there and I hope they aren't) Allied Arts has become the most knowinger-than-thou, out-of-touch, yuppie-domination, death-of-imagination organization that I have ever had the misfortune of working with. Impenetrable, idiotic and lapdog city, baby.
Smells like a Transportation Choices Coalition front. The bullet points dovetail with King County/City of Seattle's desired zoning and land use changes, and Sound Transit's "next phase" marketing pitch.
Stranger reporters: Please do some digging and tell us who's behind this new group. Their goals sound fine (yawn...21st century Planning 101), but who are these folks and what is their agenda?
New Urbanism doesn't have anything to do with yuppies. Yuppies have never shown any interest in living in New Urbanist utopias; that's why they're such a failure. Yuppies want to live in Old Urbanism, the chaotic, jumbled, mixed-up, dare-I-say-funky neighborhoods that exist in most older cities, not through the agency of any planners or designers but from the rank speculators of an earlier age.
New Urbanists are hampered by the fact that they have NO IDEA how vibrant urban neighborhoods are created. No one does. It's like farming truffles; it doesn't work. So what you get instead is marketing, marketing that can be applied to cheesy sprawl developments that ape urbanism but fight against it in every real way. Like Northwest Landing. When you boil it down, New Urbanism is nothing more than a set of pretty watercolors and a handful of Pantone cards. Sort of like the People's Waterfront Coalition.
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