 |
| Lobby of Detroit's Guardian Building |
When I last wrote about the best quotes from CNU 24, the
annual conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism recently conducted in
Detroit, I thought I had covered the entirety of the first day speech by Andres
Duany. I should have looked on the back
of my notes.
Today, I
turned over the paper and found several more quotes from Duany worthy of being
shared. As before, the quotes are
reconstructed from my notes and are likely imprecise, but capture Duany’s
intent.
On the architectural
role of public buildings: “Urbanist codes should cover residential, commercial,
and office buildings, but not public buildings.
It’s in public buildings where architects should be free to depict the
grandeur of civilization and civic life.”
On human
nature: “Good urbanism in the form of walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income
neighborhoods enables human nature to behave in its most noble form.”
On municipal
finances: “Talk to the chief financial officer of any U.S. city and ask about
the day the city will go bankrupt. The
CFO may hem and haw, but eventually admit that date is written on a scrap of
paper in one of his bottom drawers.
Because every U.S. city is going bankrupt from sprawl.”
On measuring
urbanism: “The measure of good urbanism isn’t the standard of living, but the quality
of life.”
On the
obsolescence of use-based zoning: “Use-based zoning succeeded at its primary
goal which was separating noxious land uses from other human activities. But technology has removed the noxiousness
from most of those bothersome land uses, so use-based zoning is no longer
needed.”
On
decision-making: “The current obsession with bottom-up decision-making is
wrong. Every decision has an appropriate
level at which it should be made, some at the top, some at the bottom, and some
in between.” (While concurring with
Duany’s thought, I’ll also note that input from multiple levels should be
integrated before decisions are made.)
Once again,
there’s much to mull over in Duany’s words.
When I next
return to CNU 24, I will finally leave Duany behind, at least for now, instead
turning to Kaid Benfield. But that won’t
be for several posts. In my next post,
I’ll link some brilliant thinking about neighborhoods that I recently came
across and then add a couple of thoughts expanding on the writer’s conclusions.
As always,
your questions or comments will be appreciated.
Please comment below or email me.
And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)
No comments:
Post a Comment