POSTED: 04:00 AM PDT Tuesday, September 30, 2008
BY TYLER GRAF

It’s become clear that the Pacific Northwest is leading the way in sustainable building design and urban planning in the U.S. Now an advocacy and education organization, the Congress for the New Urbanism, has taken notice and intends to get involved.

The Chicago-based organization will soon open a regional “Cascadia” chapter, with branches in Portland, Seattle and Vancouver, B.C.

The 20-year-old CNU works to promote and facilitate the tenets of new urbanism. For the built environment, this means constructing walkable cities with ample green space and public transportation.

“A lot of people in the Northwest are transplants from elsewhere, so we thought we’d come here and expand ourselves as well,” CNU spokesperson Lauren Hauck said.

With the formation of the organization’s Cascadia chapter, Hauck said the short-term goals of the CNU include getting developers, architects and city planners to become members, and getting government officials to institute new urbanism concepts.

Long-term goals for the organization include bringing its national convention to the Pacific Northwest in 2011.

It’s unlikely the organization will set up shop in Portland until later this year. It plans to file for nonprofit tax status at the end of October.

“Most of our initial programs will focus on educating people on what new urbanism is,” Hauck said.

As a concept, new urbanism arose in the 1980s in Florida, when fast-developing midsized cities were looking to create community hubs that were easy for pedestrians to navigate. Many of the early new urbanistic developments were cities, suburbs or exurbs designed and built from scratch, said Hauck.

But in the already-established city of Portland, the nascent organization is expected to support the city’s existing sustainable building services, according to Ralph DiNola, a Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design consultant and principal with Green Building Services.

“They’re going to bring a welcome perspective to urban planning,” DiNola said, “especially when it comes to the edges of the city where there’s underdeveloped or undeveloped land. There will be a focus on the smaller nodes and communities.”

The Congress of the New Urbanism will also be promoting the concept of LEED for Neighborhood Development, or simply LEED-ND, which the organization created in conjunction with the U.S. Green Building Council.

The new designation promotes dense residential clusters, based around public transportation, located near city centers and typically developed on infill sites.

Though it’s still in its pilot phase, LEED-ND certification has been awarded to two Portland projects: The Eliot Tower and Helensview Homes.

“As we start broadening our view of green buildings and we start saying, ‘It’s not just about one building at a time but rather about building green communities,’ we need to look at how we build communities,” DiNola said. “There’s only so much we can do with one single building.”

The dream city of Coruscant in Star Wars

The dream city of Not London in The Golden Compass

Like the dream cities of Le Corbusier and his modernist colleagues, the dream cities of artists have in common the fact that none of them have ever been realized. Leon Krier's dream city, Poundbury, has been realized by the capital backing of a supernaturally rich patron, and even then it has been built very slowly and carefully. In the time it has taken to develop Poundbury, millions of urbanisations have occurred elsewhere. Like the New Urbanist TNDs of America, no matter how much we enjoy their architectural quality, we cannot consider them to be real cities. The real city has been built in the emergent dimension, not by the mind of a single artist but by the material necessities of all people. While it is fairly straightforward for an artist like Leon Krier to invent and apply his own form language to imagine a complex cityscape, in order for this design to be adapted to the material necessities of millions it must also involve millions. We obviously cannot burden a single artist with this task.

And so urbanism has a wholly different starting point from architecture. The artist does not have control. No one can possibly ever have control. Everything is happening all at once everywhere at once. To attempt to stabilize this process has caused chaos everywhere.

The starting point of urbanism is the same starting point that the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, set for himself when he established the Internet's now most indispensable website. Instead of asking how to publish the expert opinion of specialists as an encyclopedia that would compete with the print powerhouses (a venture he had already attempted and failed at), Wales based his system on the theories of economist and complexity scientist Friedrich von Hayek. The idea that Hayek proposes is that there exists specific knowledge that only individuals possess, and that can only be utilized with their cooperation. Wales saw his task as the aggregation of this knowledge into one coherent system.

The world-wide-web had, since the early 90's, become a massively hyperlinked knowledge network that everyone could publish in. The reality at the time of Wikipedia's creation was that this power had not produced any kind of coherent system for basic knowledge. Aggregating knowledge had up to then been too complicated. Wales wanted, in his own words, to "make the Internet not suck." Overcoming this deficiency meant simplifying the production of web pages and hyperlinks, removing some unnecessary choices in the process. This is what the interface of Wikipedia did. Within a year, Wikipedia had grown explosively and exponentially. Making information easier to create and access had made it possible for the sum total of encyclopedic knowledge to be rapidly constituted.

This has come at a cost, however. While there is in theory unlimited freedom to add content that one considers relevant to Wikipedia, the form that this content will take on screen is very rigidly defined. This is necessary in order to achieve the complexity of the system. The design of Wikipedia is constant across every page in order to make it possible to rapidly navigate through all the information without having to relearn the rules for every article. Nevertheless, when we click on a link to a Wikipedia page, we never know what we are going to get. The design acts not as a constraint on the content, but as an enabler of the content. Without the rules enforced by Wikipedia, none of the content would have been added.

Wales and his foundation have been extremely controversial. On the one hand, in order for Wikipedia to work as it does, the foundation must provide all the support structures necessary to enable the users to create knowledge, and on the other hand it must also blindly trust the users to create information that will be accurate. It simply is not possible to control the content of so many millions of articles. To attempt this would necessarily shrink the size and reduce the complexity of the system, destroying what makes Wikipedia useful in the first place. The emergent dimension must either be embraced or rejected.

The lessons learned from Wikipedia can also be learned from the very rich past of urban planning. Historically the most successful cities have not been those who have had the least planning but the most enabling plans. The Manhattan plan of 1811, for example, provided for the flexible extension of a street grid without interfering in what could be built within the blocks, and so enabled a surge in urbanisation that was unmatched in history. Eventually this model reached its complexity limits and a new design for Manhattan was applied (with varying success), such as the building codes that gave us wedding-cake skyscrapers, and the metropolitan transit system of subways and later on expressways.

The darker side of this phenomenon has been the creation of city designs that inadvertently enabled the creation of a type of city that no one wanted. Every city, no matter how loudly the local authorities claim to be planning-free, have a design. Take the classical example of a "no planning" city, Houston. Although it has no zoning codes, Houston has a system for laying down a grid of roads that implies necessarily a large-scale, long-ride, automobile-dependent city. By their very form, these roads make some types of urbanisation easier and others more difficult. Who is going to build for a walkable neighborhood when there are no sidewalks? How can a TND make a walkable city when at every mile a thoroughfare cuts off the pedestrian links? How can a sustainable city emerge when only one form of link, long-range auto trips, can be made between destinations?

The threat that we face today is not suburban sprawl. New Urbanism and Smart Growth have been victorious in that aspect. The danger we face is dense sprawl, (see Eric Eidlin, The Worst of All Worlds Los Angeles and the Emerging Reality of Dense Sprawl) where our disconnected cities become denser and denser without becoming more complex, resulting in even poorer urban conditions. The suburb is not the design. Sprawl is the design.

Our cities may not be what we wanted, but they have not been accidents. They are the result of designs applied by the local (and sometimes not-so-local) authorities. They will only change if we invent and apply new designs for them. They cannot be architectural designs founded upon control of the artist. They also cannot be the endless grid of highway strips. Yet they must have both art and highways. It is a whole new method of design, emergent design, that we must master.

Reference

Wikipedia and Beyond: Jimmy Wales' sprawling vision

Answer: This is a question I am asked quite often. It's suprising how many people dream about moving to Williamsbugr Va. Some have had children attend school at William and Mary and grown to enjoy the city from numerous visits other simply like living amongst history and after visitng many time throughout the years finally make a decision to move. SOme have been second home buyers who will test the waters before committing to full time living her in Williamsburg. The tax rate at .54 per $100 is one of the lowest rate arond the area. It is almost half the rate of neighboring cities on the peninsula. I'm not sure what your price range is but the closest townhome/condos Would be Counselors Close neighborhood It has a very traditional Williamsburg Look and feel but is priced in the $500k + range.There are a few condo developments about 1 mile from the Colonial area of Williamsburg The Woodland off of Jamestown Rd, The Oaks off of South Henry near rt 199 both sell in the $250k + price range. There is Wyndham amd Wyndham Plantation near Colonial Parkway off Capital Landing Rd that sells for the $300k-$400k price range. A little further away is Brandywyne a community of detached upscale homes with small yards. All yard maintenence is included in the homeowner fees at Brandywyne. Bristol Commons is another condo communitiy in the city located near the new High Street Develpment. Prices there start in the low $200,000 for two bedroom condos. Further out still on the Bypass but still within the city limits of Williamsburg are Claiborne and Westgate Condos. Both start in the low $200,000 for two bedroom condos. The Village at Quarterpath is  a brand new community about 1/2 a mile from the restotred area of Colonial Williamsbugr. Both attached townhomes and detached homes. Prices for thownhomes in Quarter Path start at $280,000 for two bedroom townhomes. Detached homes start  Anything close ( walking distance) to the restored area of Colonial Williamsburg is going to be more expensive than townhomes/ condos a few miles away in James City County. You may want to consider New Town Condos there start in the $230k price range for one bedrooms or $255,000+ for two bedroom condos. Bennington and Foundation Square are the two condo developments in New Town. Both offer elevators. Foundation Square has underground parking, BEnnington offers assigned carports for parking. Townhomes in New Town range from around $300,000 to $500,000. Square footage in these townhomes range from 1600 to over 3000. New Town is only 3-4 miles from the Colonial Area of Williamsburg has almost all of the conveniences you would need to live. Grocery Store ( Trader Joes just opened), Restaraunts ( at last count there were 19+ places to eat in New Town) , Banks, Medical offices, Movie theater, Barnes & Noble and many more shops. Bus service is available to other areas of Williamsburg VA
High Street is a brand new development just being developed in the City of Williamsburg on Bypass Rd about 2 miles from the Restored area of CW. It will feature Townhomes with starting prices in the high $400's. It will be another planned community ( like New Town) but on a smaller scale, featuring shops , restaraunts,movie theater. If you want to consider condos a little farther from the center of town there are numerous communities with prices starting in the low $200,000's. It only takes a few hours to tour all of the developments in the area .Please contact  me if you would like to take a brief tour and see all of the available options for housing in Williamsburg VA.

I will post a few photos of each condo and town home neighborhood in Williamsburg, Virginia so that you can get a feel for each area/ neighborhood.

from Apartment Therapy New York | How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand.

Movie Tavern combines the enjoyment of movies with an in-theatre dining experience. A menu of Classic American favorites is served to Movie Tavern guests while they enjoy first-run films in state-of-the-art auditoriums.

Roseland the High Street developer has pushed back the opening of the retail stores as well. They are scheduled to open in Spring of 2009. The only announced tenants/ stores are Kilwins Ice Cream ( a celebrated part of Northern Michigan since 1947. Kilwins has earned a reputation for it's quality products and excellent service. Using only the finest and freshest ingredients)  and Five Guys Burgers and Fries. ( One of the best burgers I have eaten, great fries too !)  It has been said there are an additional 10- 15 stores that are still to be announced.

The residential section of High Street is coming along without any delay. Residents are already living in the Luxury Sterling Manor Apartments,  Approximately 16 town homes with detached garages are mostly complete. Landscaping and interiors are being finished as I write this. The models should be open soon.

Roseland Property Company the developer of High Street  is a full-service real estate organization primarily involved in the development and construction of waterfront and mixed-use residential properties throughout the northeastern United States.

They have substantial experience in waterfront and brown fields redevelopment. Roseland Property Company  has won several recent designations as developer or co-developer for projects with national significance such as Pier One in Boston, Massachusetts where Roseland is redeveloping one-half mile of Boston Harbor into a luxury residential community; the Hingham Shipyard in Hingham, Massachusetts, where the company will create a residential/retail waterfront development; and the State of New Jersey's first-ever transit village, The Highlands at Morristown, that will couple convenient commuter rail transportation with luxury apartment living and major retail conveniences.

Click here To search all townhomes / condos available for sale , new and resalein High Street , Williamsburg VA

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Map of New Town Williamsburg

New Urbanism is the core design philosophy of New Town, Williamsburg, VA. This international movement seeks to create a more sustainable building approach by balancing homes, jobs, and the preservation of meaningful open spaces on a more human scale. No big boxes, no mega-malls, just what we need for great living, where we need it.

The CNU's Charter of the New Urbanism says:

Founded nearly thirty years ago by forward thinking planners and architects, New Urbanism has found national and international successes and is no longer considered Utopian theory about how we can live.

In the last two decades, amazing places like Seaside and Celebration, Florida,Stapleton Colorado, Kentlands, Maryland, and Harbor Town, Tennessee, have seen the return of not only community, but of sustainable value. Kids are safely outdoors more, neighbors know each other better, everyone cares more about the community in which they live.

What’s more, these communities are showing that higher densities with meaningful green spaces create a lasting value, both financially and socially.

New Urbanism seeks to provide transportation alternatives while creating positive places. By reducing automobile dependence and providing mobility choices, places like New Town, Williamsburg, VA can reduce the cost of living and the cost of commuting at the same time.

I encourage you to learn more about the New Urbanism by visiting the Congress for the New Urbanism at www.cnu.org.

New Town, Williamsburg, VA business districts are like nothing you may have experienced in a suburban setting.

Shops, entertainment, and a vibrant office environment work together in perfect synergy to satisfy the daily needs of residents while providing unparalleled choice to those who visit.

It’s another way that New Town, Williamsburg, VA raises the bar on complete living, meeting all of the needs of the community, businesses and residents alike.

In most suburban communities, taking a walk means putting your health in jeopardy because you are sharing roads that are built to move cars, not pedestrians.  New Town, Williamsburg, VA  turns this notion on end, recognizing that one of the best sustainable practices is providing the opportunity to walk and bike to most daily needs.New Town, Williamsburg, VA  encourages walking by creating beautiful environments to walk through, making it an easy decision to leave the car in the garage more often.

Design details like narrow streets and wide sidewalks  ensure that the streets of New Town, Williamsburg, VA are inviting to the pedestrian, making a sensible choice of what was once not an option in the suburbs.

Neighborhood Parks

In  New Town, Williamsburg, VA everyone has the chance to experience wonderful outdoor settings within easy walking distance from their homes. No matter where you are in New Town, Williamsburg, VA  there are plazas, greens and courtyards. You will surely find your personal favorite among the dozens of neighborhood parks.

In New Town the streets are interconnected with  each other and provides over four miles of continuous trails through over three hundred acres of park system. 

Roads/ Transportation

Roads. There have always been too few to handle the traffic of the suburbs. The fact is, there will never be enough roads if cars are the only way to get around.

Bicycles have easy routes to all corners of the community, allowing for more than recreational rides. Expect to see more people shopping and going to work by bike as they recognize the ease of getting out of the fast lane in New Town, Williamsburg, VA

 Community buses provide chances for residents to conveniently travel to Colonial Williamsburg and other parts of James City County without having to drive and park. 

There is an Amtrak Station within a few miles in Williamsburg which  provides a link to Downtown Richmond, Washington DC, Philadelphia, New York City and beyond.

Most importantly, New Town is proving that businesses and homes can exist in close proximity enabling people to live in a truly walkable distance from nearly all of their daily needs. At  New Town, Williamsburg, VA  the choice of how you travel is back in your hands. 

Diversity

 New Town, Williamsburg, VA is a place for all people. It is that simple. Gone is the notion that you have to have kids, or have to be an "active adult" or other category of lifestyle. A wide  variety of styles of housing, providing equal opportunities for living by those of vastly different means.

The American Dream of today is different than that of decades ago. Today, we want something more than anything else…our time.  New Town, Williamsburg, VA gives people more of their day to make choices that are meaningful to them.

Lifestyle

In New Town, Williamsburg, VA residents will not have to fight traffic on their way home from work or venture far from their front door to pick up a loaf of bread. Social, leisure, and entertainment opportunities are equally accessible and convenient.

Housing choices are plentiful in New Town. Mid Rise Condos are available in both Bennington on the Park and Foundation Square, Town homes are available in Abbey Commons, Savannah Square and Chelsea Green,  prices range from the low $200's for condos to around $500k for the largest town homes .Floor plans range in size from 1200 to over 3000 square feet.  Detached homes will be available in the future. Prices and plans have yet to be announced. There are also town home style apartments for rent available at Oxford of New Town

Dining

As of today I counted 20 different places to eat in New Town. There should be a place for everyone's taste. It includes : Art Cafe 26, Barnes and Noble, Bonefish Grill, Buon Amici, California,Tortilla, Center Street Grill, Cheeburger Cheeburger, CoCo Chocolatier, Great Harvest Bread Co, Green Leafe New Town, Harbour Coffee , Ichiban ( chinese cuisine), Maggie Moos Ice Cream, New Town Coffee and Tea, Opus 9 Steakhouse, Panera, Quiznos, Thai Pot and The Corner Pocket ( a billiard parlor as well as restaraunt)

As a local REALTOR working in New Town I would be happy to assist you in finding a home there.  Click this link to search all real estate ,homes, condos town homes ,new and resale  currently for sale in New Town/ James City County Williamsburg VA

Click here to search all other real estate/ homes, condos ,townhomes, land for sale in the Williamsburg, James City, New Kent or York County Virginia

Click here to search for real estate,land,homes,condomiuns, town homes, commercial, in any of the following areas through the REIN MLS Database ( real estate information network) Chesapeake, Gloucester, Emporia, Greenvile, Hampton, Isle of Wight, Mathews,  Newport News, Norfolk, Northampton,  Poquoson, Portsmouth, Smithfield, Southampton, Suffolk, Sussex, Surry, VA Beach, York, Yorktown, Virginia

Click here to search real estate, land, homes, condos, town homes, commercial in the following counties of North Carolina Camden, Chowan, Currituck, Dare, Elizabeth City, Gates, Hertford, Moyock, Pasquotank, Perquimans using the REIN MLS Database

contact: John Womeldorf/ REALTOR

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Watkins starts by talking about his impression of a beer garden while recently in Munich:

They have beer gardens in Munich. Outside. In parks. Where children play, and moms walk with a stroller in one hand and a beer stein in the other. They drink, communally, outside. In the middle of a weekday afternoon. Some even actually wear lederhosen. They share giant picnic tables with complete strangers and awestruck tourists like me. They guzzle liter after liter of ridiculously good beer out of massive glass beer steins in public. And the most remarkable thing: generally speaking, they do this with extreme civility, without the slightest whiff of debauchery.

He then goes on to lampoon the idea of a beer garden in America. A beer garden in America, Watkins suggests, would first be a curiosity, second a commercial hot spot ("McBeerstein" anyone?), thirdly a local police nightmare and — just before the trees walk away from the disaster — is lastly paved over by suburbia.

The question the article raises, though, is a good one. Can Americans duplicate the community found in a German beer garden? Would the availability of such outdoor spaces "force us to experience nature with strangers, start new traditions, get out of our cars and malls, encourage family interaction, and create relationships and spirited conversation?" Watkins lays out what he thinks it will take for something like this to succeed in the states. For example, more pies cooling on window sills, more enormous squash featured in local vegetable competitions and the Cubs winning the World Series. He sums up the opportunity with this equation:

And if you're not into beer, why not wine. Or tea. Or coffee. How about a nice mango lassi on a hot afternoon. No Kool-Aid or other lo-fi beverages, please; surely there's a correlation between the quality of what's consumed and the quality of the adjacent conversation. The point is that there's something in the nature of a German beer garden that Americans need to pay attention to. We lack this kind of forum and community in our culture, mostly. Our culture would benefit from such a space. We as people will benefit from relaxed, open-air conversation and new friends.

Maybe we take baby steps, Watkins posits, starting with informal gatherings in the park. Later we can add the drink, when "the awkwardness subsides."

Photo from Wikipedia by Fritz Geller-Grimm.

The other method is the composition. In a composition we also apply an iterative algorithm, but instead of breaking down the initial geometry, we expand it. The fractal grows out instead of growing in. This is how urbanisation proceeds, by composing new streets and buildings onto an already existing web of streets and buildings, until we have reached the complexity limit of the largest city we can support.

If we look at this compositional fractal we see that the scale of the structure composed to the initial geometry increases exponentially. The largest structure comes last.

Many of the elementary cellular automatons discovered by Stephen Wolfram produce this fractal using only one dimension of instructions. Each cell, depending on its state (black or white) and the state of its left and right neighbors, applies the rule to determine its new state. A new line is written for every iteration of the algorithm on the previous line. The complexity of the structure only becomes visible when the time dimension is displayed. At their local scale, the cells are not able to "see" how their actions create the system, but their actions do in fact make something bigger than themselves. They are creating a structure by emergence, and this emergence is visible only in a dimension larger than their actions: the emergent dimension.

I believe that the distinction between building and urbanisation, that is to say the distinction between action by decomposition and composition, also defines the distinction between architecture and urbanism. Architecture intervenes on a rigid structure defined at the beginning of the process, the building, and so runs into very strict economic limits of the scale of this large structure. Urbanism has to deal with the problem of creating large structures out of all of the small scale urbanisations that are undertaken by large numbers of individuals, all seeking to build something to suit their own personal problems. It is in that sense the inverse of architecture. Urbanism takes place in the emergent dimension.

The field of urban design has gained a lot of popularity since efforts to plan whole cities were abandoned. The focus of the urbanists has shifted to the scales considered controllable: the development, greenfield, brownfield and other. The most successful of the urban designers are the New Urbanists. They have managed to produce their name-brand Traditional Neighborhood Developments in practically every city in North America. It starts off inevitably with one developer and centralized ownership of the land that will be urbanised. This land is then decomposed into streets and squares along the principles proclaimed by the New Urbanist charter, the negative of which is decomposed into lots that will be further decomposed into buildings. In terms of production processes, New Urbanist TNDs are no different than the regular, economically-unsustainable subdivisions. They belong in the realm of architecture, and what is worse, they provide no connection to the larger urban context within which they are being inserted, suburbia.

Here is the Mackenzie Towne TND at the limits of Calgary Alberta, in mid-decomposition.

And here we see the development within the larger context of southern Calgary.

What were to happen to the people who have moved into the first part of the development if the developer declared bankruptcy, as has been the case in many developments these recent times? The construction site would remain in perpetuity, and their town would be incomplete. That is the very opposite of what a city is supposed to do, to provide a complete system regardless of the chaotic course of events.

Will the people of Mackenzie Towne live a New Urbanist lifestyle? One look at the bigger scale of the City of Calgary is sufficient to say no. The development is not the relevant scale of the urban life of its inhabitants. This follows from the fact that it is only a small part of the city as a whole, but is also what makes urban design economically possible in the first place. In order to be able to undertake a decomposition at that scale, we must be composing it to a much bigger system of urban relations.

I fear that no matter how intense the efforts the New Urbanists undertake to convert local authorities to their system, they will never be able to transform cities in their emergent dimension. We will continue to see appear, alongside TNDs, gigantic commercial strips, industrial zones and office parks, which will continue to form the emergent dimension of North American cities. At their center will be the caracteristic integrator of all of these urbanisations, the one space that every inhabitant of any modern city shares, the highways.

What then is urbanism? It is the glue that sticks different urbanisations, different architectural projects, together. North America has known only two general types. For all of the 19th century, and the first part of the 20th, the urbanism of North America was The Grid: unending checkerboard patterns of streets between which were blocks that were more or less developable into anything not bigger than the block. As cities grew with more urbanisations, new streets and blocks were composed onto existing streets and blocks, and this went on until the urban chaos became intolerable and people fled to the suburbs, a flight that was enabled by the new urbanism: the highway strip. The highway strip continues to be the compositional rule that integrates all North American cities. If you look again at Mackenzie Towne, the highway that borders it seems to have no relation at all to the development. This amounts to no urbanism. The emergent dimension is empty of any structure.

The New Urbanists have launched a parralel effort, alongside the TND, to reform municipal authorities' urbanism by inventing a building code, the SmartCode, that is supposed to fit into any city. Building codes have been the primary tool of urbanism for centuries. The reason they worked so well is that they made it possible for the smallest possible urbanisations to create large-scale structures, balancing local adaptation with large-scale solutions in order to create what we today call organic cities. Such a building code can do much to enable complexity, but it must be combined with the creation of the integrator spaces, streets, avenues and highways, that must also grow organically.

Looking over the fact that it doesn't appear to provide any indication of what to do with highways, the SmartCode ran into the objection that it was rules, and therefore anti-market. Ironically, the market is one of the first rules-based complex systems fully investigated. Adam Smith even christened its emergent dimension with a metaphor that continues to mystify people today: the invisible hand. The invisibility of the market results in many hotly-debated political issues, for example the incomprehension with surging gas prices during hurricanes. The reasons why gas prices should rise so rapidly escape the individual perspective, and angry commuters everywhere demand from politicians that something be done to control things. That attempt at control of the market would have unexpected consequences, just as it does in the emergent dimension of urbanism. Brasilia was the most famous realisation of fully-controlled town planning ever built, but today it is ringed with favelas and functions as one city with them. The emergent dimension of Brasilia escaped the strict control of its planners.

Urbanists must, by the nature of their work, be experts at seeing things in the emergent dimension. The tools to achieve that have yet to be invented. Economic treatises crudely made the case for the economy as an emergent system, but the 200 years of economic history that followed them showed that people would not believe what they could not see. They will not believe in the SmartCode until they can see it either. The invention of the microscope made it possible to see what was too small to see. We must invent the tool that makes it possible to see what is too large to see. Only then can we truly begin to create the cities that we want, as individuals and as communities, without taking a blind leap of faith.

Reference

Sustainable algorithmic design lecture series by Nikos Salingaros.

            In the latter half of the twentieth century, the suburbs became a microcosm of that same ideal to move away from urban decay in favor of space and solidarity.  Wealthy professionals packed up the wagon train and moved to their suburban and exurban communities.  The benefits to this lifestyle included a spacious house (and maybe a pool or large yard), quality schools, and a quiet life.  Unfortunately, this growth was predicated on the assumption that gas would be cheap and plentiful; otherwise life would be impractical and unmanageable.  In many subdivisions, there is no urban center at which to purchase goods and services—the need for a car to run errands, commute to work and school, or to find entertainment venues on weekends is a necessity.  Those people who are tethered to their jobs and their cities by car are now also tethered to any civilization whatsoever by cars.

            Some people prefer it that way—just like the pioneers could deal with living a half-day's train ride away from the nearest town.  But with a growing population; an increasingly inaccessible oil supply; years of subjugating the pragmatism of mass transit with the convenience of a car; and pollution and climate change concerns, unstructured suburbs only make sense to residents who are affluent or are determined to maintain a lifestyle of status symbols and quasi-privacy.  In Washington, D.C., for example, people ride commuter trains from Spotsylvania County—over 50 miles and almost 1.5 hours away—into the city on a daily basis.  Metrorail only penetrates the fringes of outlying Virginia and Maryland counties, meaning there is a huge demand for parking at the ends of lines.  If suburbs were the psychological antidote to cities, there has to be some way to combat this bastard children of suburbia: sprawl.

            Smart growth or transit-oriented development is a way to fit commercial and residential accommodations into a single community that is served by some means of public transportation.  The developments avoid the conformity associated with subdivisions and the sovereignty of pesky homeowners' associations.  And most importantly, the need for a car is minimized in such an environment—houses are close to schools and shops, businesses can move into new office space, walking and bicycling take priority over driving.  New urbanism is a clever tactic that combines city-style planning with the ability to install self-sufficient communities linked by rail or bus to the larger region wherever there is demand.  Here in Northern Virginia, Fairfax Corner and Reston Town Center are two recent developments, although unfortunately neither of them is connected to Fairfax County via a fixed rail service.  Tysons Corner and its impending Metrorail extension will hopefully be the poster child for an effective mixed-use community.

[caption id="attachment_401" align="aligncenter" width="416" caption="The appeal of smart growth/new urbanism: classic single-family or townhomes in the style of D.C.'s Georgetown or Alexandria, Virginia set adjacent to the street, rather than behind a driveway.  Personal garages are out of sight in alleyways in a symbolic and physical refutation of car travel.  The newness and amount of popular restaurants and stores may give the feeling of an outdoor shopping mall rather than a small town."][/caption]

            Despite the advantage of creating a sustainable suburban community that also provides jobs as well as goods and services, such development might be incompatible with some demographics.  Ultimately, for people who like the large houses and large cars that exurban privacy provides, living in a faux city is not the solution.  Americans are fond of accumulating material wealth, regardless of utility, and cry socialism every time the suggestion is made to live more frugally and with more sensitivity to the environment.  Furthermore, there is something disingenuous about an entire community that is erected over the course of several months with classic architecture and a small town feeling—yet quite simply, it is an inorganic settlement with no historical value.  While it is economical and somewhat European to live a mostly car-free existence, new urbanist communities are ultimately an alternative for the affluent professionals who reject sprawl—not necessarily for the poor or for those already dedicated to city living.  Success depends on how marketable such development is to that demographic.

            Still, the benefit to development that is friendly to greener forms of transit is obvious.  A crucial part of the strategy for managing the demand for energy is to deemphasize vehicle use in the suburbs as well as the cities.  Driving a car might be empowering or relaxing for some people, but imagine how modern it would be if you could ride a light rail from your house to the city; or how healthful it would be to ride a bicycle from school to the store.  The next post will be dedicated to the idea of bicycle friendliness in urban areas.

Now, I believe that the world’s efforts must go “Beyond Green® ” to create the development of new technologies and usage applications that help us to leap frog where we are today.  And we see this happening.  As a result, I am optimistic that the world has the expertise and ability to innovate.  Political leadership to accelerate or incentivize this process is another question I don’t delve into here.

In respect to the next several years only, here are some trends that I anticipate as they relate to people’s homes and how they choose to live:

1. Migration to the ‘center of personal gravity’ – I anticipate that people are going to base their home purchase decisions more on their place of employment, schools and other key factors such as this than ever before.  This is to reduce commuting costs in terms of fuel and travel time.  Housing cost is a prime consideration here that pushes many out into other areas.  However, with some of the anticipated trends mentioned here, I see this changing.
2. Migration back to smaller square footage for homes.  This is due to a couple of concerns.  First, utility costs for electricity will increase year to year to create a more pronounced cost for homeowners trying to cool their properties.  Given that temperatures in many areas are expected to rise and not fall, cooling costs can be expected to rise in the summer months as well as in the off-peak periods.  Second, larger homes will see a decline in per square foot pricing whereby consumers are willing to pay even less per square foot given the home's size.  For instance, buyers may look at a 4,000+ square foot home today and shy away from going with a home that large for the reasons stated above.  Tomorrow, that value may be more like 3,500+ square feet.  The home is the largest expenditure one has in their monthly budget.  So, for those that can see being quite content in a smaller home with a reduced mortgage payment and utility costs, they will choose to do so.
3. Increased insulation – Many homeowners simply have the opportunity to improve insulation in their roof attic space and will choose to.  Additional insulation for walls will be added as well.  However, inspection of heating/air conditioning and crawl spaces with an eye to closing up gaps and air leakages will result in home owners being able to reduce their energy usage significantly.  Much of the inefficiency in a home simply results from leaks in air lines and piping and gaps in insulation that allows the passing of cool/hot air.
4. Solar power – Broader adoption of solar power will depend on the cost/benefit analysis to doing so.  However, new innovations in solar can be expected to contribute to the affordability for homeowners to implement in the future.  On a large scale, the vision of wide expanses of solar panels and solar farms in the Arizona desert to provide electricity is a growing probability.  As well, companies are looking at how they can implement solar arrays on commercial buildings to take advantage of the rooftop space and an immediate local demand source for the energy output.
5. Behavior – Better homeowner behavior to curb energy usage.  We should expect to see landscape lighting times being reduced or lighting altogether turned off.  I estimate that homeowners usage patterns will become much more sensitive to avoiding waste.
6. Reduced water usage through elimination of expansive grass and vegetation areas, elimination of winter seeding activity, and collection of rainfall at the individual residence level.  The latter here is something that will take much more emphasis and deliberate action to be of benefit in my local market.  However, it stands to be an option for the watering of plants in other regions.
7. “New Urbanism”- style community development – This is the development of close-proximity communities whereby homes, retail shopping, offices, etc. are combined with green elements to allow for minimal resource usage like automobiles, water usage, electricity usage, etc.  An example of this is the Prospect New Town community in Longmont, Colorado.  However, these communities will likely be more centrally located for large sprawling communities.  Some regional real estate markets will not find these concepts appealing.  For instance, in the Phoenix market, these types of concepts can only be successful in central downtown areas.  As one leaves the center, it is inexpensive for buyers to purchase single-family homes with backyards at a likely lower price point.  The inherent difficulty with these concepts is their cost.  There is typically a premium to buy into them.
8. Slowdown of the consumerism model – Often forgotten by millions, there was a time when the products we manufactured and bought were made to last.  I like to put it to people to think about something their parents might have had or continue to have and use that has been around for years.  For instance, my mother had a washer and dryer, both of which functioned for almost 20 years.  Today, we are told that an energy efficient washing machine has an estimated lifespan of 8-10 years.  However, that unit costs 3x as much!  I believe we will see a gradual desire on the part of consumers to choose products based on a real sense of quality and longevity.  Most of the products purchased today are not expected to last and hence are considered ‘disposable.’

I have more thoughts on this and will add them from time to time.  As well, getting insights from experts in the field is something I hope to include as readership develops here.

This Labor Day I've been thinking about how the American Empire has (beginning in 1882 and adding insult to injury in 2003) co opted a time for subversive direct action and turned it into a day of mindless barbecuing and Frisbee.

More on this here and here.

The Lab is part of Sobeca an anti-mall development in Costa Mesa California. What has intrigued me about it is that its creators have through trial and error been able to establish a new socially aware shopping environment that crosses between an upscale flea market and an Artisan's craft fair. Creating a pulpable alternative to the enclosed mega malls that are proliferating many of the suburban landscapes of Western society is something that the founders can really be proud of.

Did he really say that? Yup, on May twenty-first of this year.

The man in question, 65 year old Rob Anderson, also laments the holier-than-thou attitude San Francisco cyclists carrier around in their panniers. This is believable based on what we know, stereotypically, of this city, but it's not a good reason to file a suit.

Regardless, the whole thing is amusing and reeks of irony. Bicycling encouraged to reduce pollution. Additional bike lanes presumed to create more pollution. Man who hasn't driven in two decades spearheads litigation to keep traffic flowing freely.

Modified photo from Wikipedia by Agnieszka Kwiecień

Earlier this summer there was an ARTICLE ON CNN discussing the topic of "New Urbanism" or "Walkable Urbanism." The article highlighted what was going on in a neighborhood in Elk Grove, CA. What only four years ago was a highly sought after suburban wonderland of well to do homes, with lush green lawns and cedar playground sets is now becoming a ghost town with dandelions, tall weeds, and broken picket fences lining the sidewalks.  Foreclosures are through the roof, the once popular and highly creative ARM's are maturing and the low, affordable mortgage payments that people once had are out the window forcing them to leave their homes, and the subsequent maintence of, behind.  The housing market is in the dumps and developers have been putting projects on hold or even selling off land (if they can) that they once had big plans for. An example would be the 43,000 acre Coyote Springs master planned community in Las Vegas which has come to a near standstill compared to a few years ago. The same thing is happening in places like California, Florida, Michigan,  Northern Virginia and Arizona.  As suburban land development hits the skids, urban development is taking off.

Over the past few years many of my clients have been pursuing this trend of Urban Redevelopment where developers take a vacant lot, a vacant building, or a run down block in a major metropolitan area and put in fancy new high-rise apartments and condominiums with nice dog parks, restaurants, deli's, grocery stores and public transportation all within walking distance. Great concept, a very marketable concept; so marketable believes Arthur Nelson of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute, that by 2025 there will be 22 million large-lot homes that will be occupied by lower classes who have been forced out of their once affordable homes in the city. "What is going to happen is lower and lower-middle income families squeezed out of downtown and glamorous suburban locations are going to be pushed economically into these McMansions at the suburban fringe," said Nelson. "There will probably be 10 people living in one house."

I beg to differ.

I myself am a family man, married, 3 children and two dogs, and I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, but I am pretty sure that Arthur Nelson's scenario will not live itself out here, or in most suburbs for that matter. I feel confident, that no matter what the economy brings, the majority of families with children and pets would rather live out in the 'burbs away from traffic, highly congested areas and areas of high pollution and increased crime. As a nation we are going through some difficult financial times and foreclosures are through the roof - but I do not see my neighbors packing up their home to move to the city. If they are struggling now, how will they be able to afford a brand spankin' new place in the city?

Let me back up a bit by saying that I love visiting the city - Philadelphia, New York, Boston, DC - are all AWESOME, and every time I visit I am infatuated with the architecture, the convenience, and the "buzz" that exists, especially in these newly developed areas. The restaurants are great, the night life is great and public transportation is easily accessible so no need for a car. In fact, if I were single with no real commitments I would be there in a heart beat. My suspicion is though, once these young single professionals get married and start families, they are going to want a yard for their kids to run around on and to put a swing set or pool on. They are going to want safe neighborhoods where their children can ride their bikes down the street because traffic is limited and everyone knows ALL of their neighbors.  The other beneficiaries of this lifestyle would be the Baby Boomers.  Baby Boomers who have worked hard, enjoyed life in the 'burbs, and who have accumulated some wealth where they can afford to make this move.  It also provides a little easier lifestyle where they have no lawn to groom and the maintenance issues compared to a single family detached home are far less of a concern.  These are the groups that I see most benefiting from the New Urbanism, and the group that these developers should be, and likely are, marketing to.

Call me naive, as I do not have a PhD and I have not done any research on this topic as Mr. Nelson has, but I've got to believe that this current trend of Urban Redevelopment or New Urbanism, which is a great idea and is very profitable to many developers across the country, will NOT replace the suburban lifestyles which is often a part of, and will continue to be a part of, the "American Dream." This of course is the joy of having a blog, no PhD or scientific research needed here, just a place to voice one's opinion. That being said, please voice your opinion, I would love to hear from you!

Not everyone, not surprisingly, respects the covenant equally however. The couple in the unit adjacent to my parents' recently installed white replacement windows. The association bylaws explicitly require brown trim around all windows. A year before that, the same couple added new fencing which ties into a nearby fence owned by the middle school, also a violation.

There is recourse written into the covenant, but no one wants to make waves. They have to live next to these people, after all, and litigation isn't as fun as some people make it out to be. It's been brought up in meetings and mentioned to the offenders. They feign ignorance in response, make seemingly vacant promises to rectify the issue and then go on with life.

The Architecture of Happiness points out that "The problem with unrestricted choice, however, is that it tends not to lie so far from outright chaos." The author runs with this them for a number of pages.

Is personal expression at odds with order? Is an eclectic built environment less attractive than a planned, or even just guided, space? Is what differentiates chaos from order merely a matter of personal preference?

These are the kinds of questions The Architecture of Happiness seems to be aiming at as I get a little farther into the book. Being a designer and artist and someone who is keenly aware of his surroundings in general, I undoubtedly tend towards an ordered environment. However, I believe in what might appear to be a middle ground, where variety thrives within a visual program — or where a visual program promotes and directs variety.

Photo from Wikipedia

Almost everyday I get questions about where I live...this world of New Urbanism. I get questions from friends, aquantances, co-workers, and absolute strangers. I have people ask me questions such as:

 "Is it kind of like Stepford?" -No. The women who live here are not robots.

 "Do you really hang out with your neighbors?"-Yes. I just got back from a week long vacation with my neighbors (now really good friends) Christy and Tim.

"Do people really walk to the grocery store?"  -Yeah. A lot of times people ride their bikes and of course when they have a lot of purchases people will drive.

"Are dogs allowed in your neighborhood?" -You haven't been to New Town have you?  I think everyone has a dog (this is a slight exaggeration).

"People under 55 are allowed to live there?"  -YES!I'm twenty seven years old and 5 houses next to me are all owned by twentysomethings.

"If we don't live there, can we go to the Wine Bar/Ruskin's/Cities Service Diner/Marsala's/Rudy's Ribs/Bonnidell's Ice Cream [any New Town business]?" -Yes. We don't have secret handshakes or passwords.

Because I get all kinds of questions on a pretty consistent basis I thought the best way to answer everyone who is interested in New Town or New Urbanism from a 20somethings perspective, I would start a blog. I see this as an opportunity to share my experiences with anyone who wants to listen...or read.

So if you have any questions for me...just let me know!

I myself am a fan of New Urbanism (the effort to create architecture that spurs community building through walkable streets, a focus on pedestrians and public transportation rather than cars, mixed use developments, front porches, etc.). That said, as I wrote several years ago ("Leading a Civic Horse to Water"), largely because it is hard to do good analysis in this area, I think the evidence that New Urbanism produces more social capital is still rather weak.

The focus on malls for New Urbanism is not new. While New Urbanism got its start in greenfield sites like Seaside, Florida.

But since then the movement evolved to focus on brownfield development (replacing old factories, and yes even malls) and infill development (overlaying New Urbanism on an existing urban site (often by redensifying corridors). Most recently New Urbanism had a role in thinking about the post-Katrina redevelopment (especially in Mississippi where Haley Barbour named New Urbanist-star Andres Duany to head a redevelopment task force. See some New Urbanist designs here for Cottage Square and Katrina Cottage VIII.

If New Urbanist architects and planners are successful it fits well with the fact that for many communities malls are their de facto civic spaces in a landscape that lacks any communal focal point: think the fact that many surburban communities lack a place for people to leaflet or think mall malkers and you get the concept of the shrinking civic space. It remains to be seen how creative and effective New Urbanist designers can be in converting a shrine to capitalism into a shrine for enlarging the human and civic spirit.

See World Changing Seattle's blog post with images on Malls as Public Squares here.
See Congress for the New Urbanism's report Malls Into Mainstreets.

SEATTLE--Let me preface this by saying that I fully support so-called "green" / sustainable living and environmentally friendly practices and ideas (so long as they have a realizable and tangible benefit and particularly when they have a long-term economic incentive as well). However, Seattle mayor Greg Nickels has gone too far.

Yesterday, Nickels announced a series of "car-free Sundays" to commence August in select Seattle neighborhoods. As part of the pilot for this plan, street closures for four to six hours will take place in the Alki neighborhood of West Seattle, Volunteer Park in Capitol Hill, and Rainier Avenue. If all goes well, Nickels hopes to expand the plan next summer.

Before even considering the merits of Hizzoner's latest totalitarian act, one other recent plan to reduce the number of cars on roadways bears juxtaposition: Beijing's recent car-free campaign to clear the Chinese capital's air before this summer's Olympic Games.

The main difference between these two plans (other than the sheer scope and intended results) is that one is taking place in an authoritarian Communist regime, and the other in a so-called progressive west coast city.

I'm all for walkable and livable cities and urban spaces (whatever that means--usually tax breaks for New Urbanism developers to put up unaffordable high density 5-over-2s in formerly undesirable neighborhoods) but not at the cost of my personal freedom.

The beautiful thing about America is that we are afforded (thanks to sovereign wealth funds and China's continued support of U.S. Treasuries!!) the luxury of having a democratic dialectic. You can start an NGO to protest the internal combustion engine, or you can drive a Hummer. It is not, however, or at least it should not be--the right of a city mayor to capriciously close city streets for some environmental hoo-ha.

City streets are public amenities held in trust for the public by local government and it should not be within the scope of an individual's environmental prerogatives to close them.

Nickels is quoted by the P-I as saying, "It's just for one day, just chill. Get out of the car and walk." That it's just one day (which by the way it's four actually), is little consolation to the notion that the mayor may take away my right to choose how I get from point A to point B.

Beyond the matter of principle, this idea gets even more ridiculous. What effect is closing Alki Avenue Southwest going to realistically have on sunny Sunday August afternoons? It is going to create a traffic nightmare for all of the local residents (by which I mean West Seattleites) who frequently use Alki as a corridor between other parts of West Seattle and an even worse situation for the throngs of people who will undoubtedly "not get the memo" and show up to the beach all the same. Trying to navigate along Alki Ave. on a summer Sunday is bad enough without closing the road--doing so will only bottleneck the problem surrounding the closed sections even worse.

Perhaps worse than the traffic which will undoubtedly  be created by this "green" idea, is the possibility that the back-up created by the street closures will inadvertently do more environmental harm than good. If cars are sitting or idling while waiting to get around affected closure areas, then they will likely offset any potential emissions reductions that might be achieved by those who actually heed the mayor's advice to, "get out of the car and walk."

This is the first of a series of columns I intend to write on “the next conservatism.” In them, I will lay out where I think conservatism needs to go after the end of President George W. Bush’s second term.

Some people may wonder about the theme, “the next conservatism.” Isn’t conservatism always the same? Don’t we call ourselves conservatives because we believe in what Russell Kirk called “the permanent things,” truths that hold for all time?

Of course we do. We believe that truth comes from God, who does not change. We hold certain beliefs, such as the impossibility of perfecting man or human society, that define conservatism in any period. In fundamentals, what was true for Russell Kirk was also true for Edmund Burke. We are not relativists. We do not hold that there is or can be a different “truth” for each time, place or person, depending on what is “true for them.”

Yet it is also true that conservatism changes over time. Sometimes, that is because ideologies that are not really conservative try to disguise themselves with the conservative label (real conservatism is not an ideology at all). But more often, it is because new events face conservatives with new challenges. While our basic beliefs do not change, the circumstances to which we must apply those beliefs do. Burke and Churchill were both conservatives, but in the face of the French Revolution Burke stressed the importance of hierarchy and order, while under the threat of Nazism Churchill spoke of defending liberty. Their views were not contradictory, but the situations they faced were different. - Paul M. Weyrich, 18 July 2005

Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation's Next Conservatism web-page, replete with articles dedicated to topics ranging from "Country Life" to "Conservative New Urbanism" to "A Post-Literate Culture", absolutely fascinates me. As Weyrich posits in the excerpt above, the Next Conservatism is no-thing more (or less!) than the immutable, non-ideological conservatism of Kirk's permanent things; it's also, in a manner of speaking, an ideology, as conservatism must become in the political ring; not just an ideology, though, particularly not that of modern main-stream conservatism, the Next Conservatism embraces the crunchiness of Rod's conservatism, the protectionist sentiments of M'r Buchanan, Wendell Berry's agrarianism, a paleo-conservative/Old Rightist skepticism toward foreign intervention, and just about every other scrap of belief espoused by the diverse traditionalist conservative veins for which I am possessed of any affinity. From some ideas Weyrich presents, I deviate, but, by and large, I endorse the platform of the Next Conservatism. Expect, in the next couple of days, some commentary on specific essays, expressly those on New Urbanism (He defends sprawl, and I wish to suggest that, for the worse, he confounds sprawl with what can be a perfectly healthy sub-urban alternative to city life.) and agrarianism.

The Congress for the New Urbanism Colorado Chapter Organizing Committee announces a tour of The South Main Neighborhood in Buena Vista, Colorado. The tour will take place on August 2, 2008 with a tour at 11:00AM, lunch at 12:30PM and a slide show at 1:30PM.

South Main Tour Handout and Map

The South Main Neighborhood was designed by Dover, Kohl and Partners to extend historic downtown Buena Vista to the Arkansas River, site of a whitewater park for kayaking, rafting, fishing, hiking and biking. More than two acres of river corridor was donated to the town as a permanent public park, and Katie Selby Urban, co-founder of South Main, wrote and coordinated a grant with Great Outdoors Colorado and fundraised in the community to fund the whitewater park.

The property was once used as a trash dump, and pre-construction clean-up was extensive. The project began with a week-long public charrette process, which helped South Main garner a high level of community support. Co-founders and siblings, Jed and Katie (both in their 20’s at the time) led the project, their first, through the entitlement process, which was complete in one year. After another year of work on infrastructure and architectural reviews, vertical construction began in January 2007.

Currently there are 21 homes and businesses under construction. All homes are required to be certified through Built Green Colorado. The architectural review process, which was initially extensive due to the custom nature of all the homes. Such significant activity in a town of 2500 has sparked many conversations on land use and zoning and has helped influence smart growth in Chaffee County.

Another set of ideas that were presented in another POP SCI article, was the 10 audacious ideas to save the world. I'm not crazy about the microwave solar satellites, or the flocked plants, but there were other ideas like the nuclear power plants to produce synthetic gasoline from the carbon dioxide from the air. Or the methane digester, powered by sewer systems. Of course, then there is the awesome use of hog urea for plastics and deicers... uh yeah, pig pee... Or then the mini nuke 4S "battery"...
Of course my main source for alot of these things was terrain.org. And there is one more thing I'd like to highlight from their recent blog issue. A highlight of a recently built new urbanist community. I'd love to visit this place!

BTW, this is the first time I haven't used a outsource editor for my blog. I'm actually writing this from the wordpress area. I love using BlogDesk, but after it messed with my supposed post for Sarah's birthday, which never got published, and it didn't seem right to publish it after her birthday... So then I started using the Firefox plug in Scribefire, which is awesome for note collecting, but I have to come here to wordpress to edit my html tags so they'll actually work, and of course it always post it to uncategorized, whether I change the check boxes or not... But both Scribefire and BlogDesk (which is a separate program) post to all of my blogs should I so desire... So what is a guy to do?

[edit]

Yes I know... The actual WP window itself is killing my links the same way it was killing my ScribeFire and BlogDesk links... It's on WordPress, not my programs. So I guess I'll start looking for other ways. Anybody know of a good blog site?

I'm in love with Lavasa. My wife & kids say they have never seen me in love with anyone like I love Lavasa. It was love at first sight. Now, the staff there agrees too! Almost every weekend, they look at me with wide eyes, treat me with kid-gloves and wonder what does doctor see in the Construction Sites? Ekaant is my base & I love exploring the nooks & corners of the growing city.

Lavasa is India's first hill station since Independence. It is being developed by HCC India near Pune. It is spread over 12,500 acres (51 km2) of land and is scheduled to be completed by 2021. The first phase (Dasave) is scheduled to become operational by June 2009. It will be a self-equipped city developed on the principles of New Urbanism.The city is planned to strike a balance between urban living and preservation of the environment. The master plan by HOK envisages a township in harmony with nature where nature begins at the doorstep. This master plan won both the Award for Excellence 2005, given by the Congress for the New Urbanism (USA) and the American Society of Landscape Architects Award—2005. The concept of a hill town dates from British colonial times and describes locations where British administrators went during the Indian tropical summer, prominent examples being Shimla, Kulu, and Ooty. It is just 210 minutes from home in Mumbai & this drive takes you to another world. The monsoons in Western India are the best time to visit the Sahyadris & with the Lavabahn (the equivalent of the German Autobahn) rolled out three years ago by HCC from Pirangut to Lavasa, driving in the rains on the Lavabahn is pure Lust!

Lust is any intense desire or craving for gratification and excitement. Lust can mean strictly sexual lust, although it is also common to speak of a "lust for men", "lust for blood" (bloodlust), or a "lust for power" (or other goals), and to "lust for love" - Wikipedia

The Greek word which translates as lust is epithymia (επιθυμια), which is also translated into English as "to covet". The word 'lust' originally had no negative connotation, but it has developed a connotation of sexual sin. We must add "Lust For Lavasa" to the Wikipedia annals. A few weekends ago, I decided to add to my solitude at Ekaant & introduce my Dad to Lavasa. My Dad convinced my daughter to accompany us. It was a beautiful weekend with Monsoon madness interrupted by the changing colors of the sky over the Mose valley. The clouds as I had promised them walked into our rooms & wafted into our nostrils. If you have never tasted a water-rich cloud, take in the fragrance at Ekaant on the upper level rooms. You open the 8 feet glass doors & the clouds come dancing in. The rains had scrubbed the place clean. This time the staff had some ugly tarpaulin & plastic curtains strapped down obliterating the view to the Warasgaon lake. Their argument was the rain lashes into the bedrooms if we leave them open. I convinced the FOM, Subashis Dutta that he was cutting off my Oxygen with the strapped down curtains. I spent most of Saturday evening walking around in the open - getting wet like I was having an anatabuse reaction! Early next morning, his staff got the curtains off & I got a new lease of life on this Wet Sunday. 

I invited my Dad for a personal recce of the Valley city and told him how the lake was not yet full, but would be overflowing by our Independence day if the rains keep coming down like this. We decided not to go back on Sunday evening - Akanksha (my daughter) vetoed going back on Sunday evening. I was the happiest man at Ekaant! We decided to checkout at 5am on Monday so we could all be at our places of work by 9am Monday. 

I am convinced that this will be the most beautiful amalgam of man & nature that India has ever seen in half a decade. as Indians, we should be proud of our brethren who had the vision.

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
-Unknown