By Roger
Schroeder
After
reading the community planning article “Required Viewing” by Steel,
it occurred to me that most of our community–especially in the city–has
essentially been already “planned” if you consider the plan to be
roads, sewers, water, electric and zoning. In the City of Buffalo, most of our
plan was determined by the early 1900s. So when we talk about “New
Urbanist Planning” we are talk about it affecting a small percentage of
our community, especially with our small to negative population growth. To
complicate matters, any “new urban communities” will drain our
population further from our core.
The “If
we can’t fix our problems, what can we do?” thinking forces me to examine
the changes that are occurring around me, for good and bad, to see if we can
reduce the negatives and foster more of the positive. In effect, we need to make
the concept of “new urbanism” mean the act of restoring and updating
our existing (old) urbanism. Lots of people are already working on this: PUSH,
Heart of the City Neighborhoods, Buffalo ReUse to name a few, and we have seen
from the excitement of the Extreme Makeover Home Edition project that many want
this change to happen fast. Our biggest challenge could be framed: To re-build
a city that all of our residents want to live in. That’s a big goal.
The Massachusetts
Extreme Makeover house got many thinking that there should be more of these
houses and projects, and I agree, but there could be many models for infill in
our “re-urbanism plan”. Consider this: the 2000 census household size
was 2.29 persons per household with 44,593 people living alone in the city–that
is 38 percent of us living alone.
As many of us
know, living alone in a conventional home accentuates the concept of
“alone” with space and rooms designed around the concept of family
gathering. We also know that many have figured how to make their status of
alone cool and, in many ways, desirable (for example, the success of city loft
living).
I offer the
style of our own house–a no bedroom studio with workspaces–as a possible
desirable alternative to the conventional three-bedroom home. It allows the
inhabitant to throw off the conventional concepts of home as “family
space” and create home as “creative space”. With this comes some
nice advantages of small space thinking: less maintenance, small mortgage, lower
taxes, and tiny utility bills. It could offer the community some advantages:
allowing creatives, empty nesters and couples to inhabit neighborhoods that
they might otherwise overlook. The City of Buffalo, with its plentiful supply
of vacant lots, is a great place to innovate.
I have created
a web site to illustrate some of these specific concepts. This is in no way intended to be a
full solution to our urban problems, but it offers the opportunity for others
to suggest new products (building types) to reinvigorate interest in city as
the most desirable place to live. And in the end, many “small acts”
creating an exciting desirable city would be an extreme win-win for all Western
New Yorkers.