While many places that use the Living City Toolkit may not be located in sprawl, the initiatives below are creating a wealth of tools that aid in the core missions of the Toolkit because both the Sprawl Retrofit movement and the Living City Toolkit are seeking to heal places that haven’t been doing nearly as well as they could. There are three parallel initiatives that aim to take unsustainable places and transform them into those that can be sustained: Sprawl Repair, Suburban Retrofit, and Sprawl Recovery. Leaders and supporters of these initiatives met together recently at the CNU Sprawl Retrofit Council in Miami, where all three of the parallel initiatives joined under the CNU’s Build a Better Burb banner.
The Sprawl Repair initiative was founded by Galina Tachieva, a partner at DPZ. It is the most robust of the three, having produced the Sprawl Repair Manual and an online community whose participants include a number of urbanist leaders.
Suburban Retrofit
Retrofitting Suburbia is a book co-authored by Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. Galina and Ellen recently co-hosted
The Original Green Sprawl Recovery initiative is just the work of one person for now, and has not yet produced a book, but it may be the most applicable to the Living City Tolkit because it does not have to begin with sprawl. It can begin with any stage of urbanism, including marginalized traditional neighborhoods. Sprawl Recovery is based on three foundations:
The Transect - In order to transform a place, it is essential to have certainty about the mature character of a place, but not necessarily the details. The Transect is a robust system for providing that certainty of character that allows municipalities to approve a sprawl recovery project; the Transect-based SmartCode is the premier model form-based code in the world, and is essential to rebuilding traditional neighborhoods because conventional use-based (and sprawl-inducing) zoning codes make old existing urbanism illegal, and impossible to rebuild properly.
Walk Appeal - The Walk Appeal book is currently in process, and will lay out a sophisticated system of predicting where people will choose to walk. Walk Appeal has some characteristics that are measurable and some that are immeasurable but equally important. The Walk Appeal of a place is a strong predictor of the economic health, environmental health, and public health of the place and its citizens.
The Sky Method - Just as children are not born as mature adults, great cities were never built in their mature condition at the beginning. The Sky Method allows development in many small increments over time. The ability to start small and grow large makes many things possible that would be otherwise impossible post-Meltdown. While it was originally conceived as an ultra-lean method of developing new places, it works equally well with a starting point of either existing sprawl or existing traditional neighborhoods.