Court Street Plaza, Montgomery AL

A classic cobblestone plaza is emerging within the umbrella of the Dover Kohl Downtown Redevelopment Plan for Montgomery, Alabama,. When asked by Ken Groves, City Planning and Development Director, to review construction drawings for a roundabout circling the 1885 Court Street fountain, Rick Hall and DeWayne Carver of Hall Planning and Engineering initially provided edits to the construction plans. Upon further reflection, they concluded the roundabout appeared too casual for this grandest of settings in the heart of Montgomery, Alabama’s capital. Inaugural parades, Christmas festivals and other civic events all occur in this space when citizens gather. Based on great examples of Europe’s plazas and the historic form of Montgomery’s own Court Street square, a plaza was recommended by HPE. Designs include flush pavement at the edges, traffic circulating around the historic fountain, bollards at key locations and over 30,000 square feet of “Belgian Cobble” brick pavers. Several design iterations ensued, with conventional traffic designers recommending full pavement markings to explicitly guide motorists and pedestrians within pre-assigned lanes. HPE designers assured the city that a design speed of 25 mph would make explicit pavement markings, or guide lines, unnecessary. The lack of extensive markings would, in fact, help manage the vehicle speeds to the pedestrian friendly 20 to 25 mph range. Rough pavement texture and traffic enforcement will also help manage vehicle speeds. Per HPE’s recommendation, City of Montgomery Engineer, Chris Conway is considering the same cobblestone pavers used at Alys Beach in Walton County, FL. The new plaza is expected to open in approximately four months.

View a PDF of the final Plaza design here You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file.

Gaines Street Workshop

HPE and Huffman/Tarmey Architecture conducted a workshop May 9-10, 2006, to explore new ways to create a walkable, economically vibrant Gaines Street. Building on past work of the Gaines Street Committee and City staff, the workshop added the design experience of HPE and Huffman/Tarmey to create a plan allowing two-way traffic on Gaines Street while maintaining good walkability.

View a PDF of the final presentation here (file is 5MB. You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader to view this file).

Livable Communities

The Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) and Florida State University are cosponsoring a series of workshops this summer on Livable Communities. The workshops offer principles, practices, strategies and Florida-based case studies, providing community planners, transportation officials, developers and elected leaders with information necessary to create visionary, workable and practical plans leading to greater safety, more sustainable neighborhoods, villages, towns, cities and transportation projects and systems. Registration is free. Click the flier at left or on the links below for more details.

Trainers

Billy Hattaway, P.E., former FDOT State Roadway Engineer.

Dan Burden, senior urban designer, Glatting Jackson, and executive director of Walkable Communities, Inc.

View a sample workshop agenda here.

Visit the website for this workshop

From the December 2004 issue of New Urban News

A suburban agglomeration becomes a downtown

By ROBERT STEUTEVILLE

The roughly half-square-mile heart of Kendall in Dade County, Florida, is imprinted so deeply with conventional suburban development that it is difficult to imagine it changing in character. At the very center of Kendall is the 1.4 million sq. ft. Dadeland Mall, surrounded by parking, on a 70-acre parcel. To the north of the mall are low-rise apartment complexes, to the south are various commercial buildings — all auto-oriented, with no coherent urban design. The entire site is bisected by a functional drainage waterway called Snapper Creek and is bounded on the east by a mega-arterial, US Route 1.

In that environment the new urbanist firms of Dover, Kohl & Partners and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company led a charrette in 1998 to design Downtown Kendall. The resulting plan envisioned so many radical changes that it seemed a fantasy. Gone were the parking lots, amorphous strip developments, and scores of single-use apartment buildings. Snapper Creek was reimagined as a Venice-like canal. The mall, though it remained, was to be hidden behind mixed-use buildings. An interconnected network of pedestrian-friendly streets was drawn across the 338-acre area, punctuated by more than a dozen squares and greens. The whole sector was overlaid with a form-based code geared to generate the intensive urbanism of a downtown. The county approved the code, and new urbanist traffic engineer Rick Hall designed streets for the new grid in 2002 and 2003.

LO AND BEHOLD

This year, spurred by a local real estate boom, Downtown Kendall is emerging — nay, erupting. More than 3,000 residential units, 350,000 square feet of retail/commercial, 110,000 square feet of office space, and a hotel are under construction or in permitting, and a Marriott hotel was recently built. All is designed according to the code. The county estimates that 7,000 housing units will eventually be built in this area, although the number could go higher.

“We feel vindicated by the rapid build-out, because there were a lot of people in the real estate industry that were very skeptical that the kinds of uses called for in the form-based code would be marketable, and that people would want to live in Downtown Kendall,” says Victor Dover of Dover, Kohl.

More than a dozen private developers are involved, and they seem to be adjusting well to the new code. “Developers can deal with anything you tell them as long as it is predictable,” says Miami-Dade County’s assistant director of planning and zoning Subrata Basu. “This achieves that predictability. … I don’t think they care whether it is a form-based code or other kind of code, as long as it gives them what they need to make money. They see it as a profitable venture.” The substantial demand for housing and the significant South American investment flowing into Dade County are two factors driving development in Kendall, he adds.

Dover is not surprised that developers are investing. “Given the clarity and predictability of the form-based code, they don’t have to wonder what the local government wants,” he says. “Developers are waiting for this, and they are waiting in every jurisdiction across the country.”

The county is enforcing the code and acting, in effect, as the project’s master developer, Dover says. Yet private developers are constructing the buildings and streets, and the Chamber of Commerce initiated the project in the mid-1990s. “This started as a private initiative … the government was a willing partner,” he explains.

Downtown Kendall may be the most important test to date of a form-based code. On a site like this, with multiple parcels and landowners, the urban form is created by the street grid — which was drawn as part of the charrette process — and by the code. A form-based code works like an extruder, says new urbanist author Peter Katz. If the demand for development is there — as it is in Kendall — market forces will push projects through the code and they come out in an urban form. Currently, development is under way on 35 of the 270 acres that can be built upon in Downtown Kendall. Within a year or two, the urban form should be palpable.

While the Kendall code does not regulate architectural style, it has a number of strict design standards. Some elements are required throughout the site and will give the project a distinct character. To protect pedestrians from the intense South Florida sun, the code calls for colonnades, arcades, or dense rows of street trees shading the sidewalks. Many of the buildings currently under construction have colonnades.

The biggest problems with the code have arisen when it conflicted with public works standards and practices — particularly clear-sight triangles at intersections, says Basu. “Public Works goes by their own standards — they won't budge,” he explains. “Each project negotiates their own solutions.” Changes have primarily involved pushing the on-street parking back from the intersection, and there have been suggestions about moving colonnades back from the curb a few feet and even lining up the columns at an angle to the curb, says Hall. “You can imagine what that would do to the streetscape,” he says. Conflicts may arise because prevailing standards are meant for automobile-oriented places, which describes most of Dade County, Basu says. Now the county wants to encourage urban centers like Downtown Kendall, near transit stops (Downtown Kendall has two). “We want to come up with a separate set of public works standards for the urban centers,” Basu says. It’s too early to tell if this wrangling is doing any harm to the pedestrian environment. The street sections are being built in accordance with Hall’s recommendations.

The public, which is just now seeing tall buildings (up to 25 stories) come out of the ground, is concerned about traffic and general impact. Even though the charrette generated significant public consensus and numerous articles in local publications, many citizens have not focused on the plan until recently. At the county commissioner level, the project continues to enjoy strong support, Basu says.

All of the current development is taking place on outlying parcels to the south, east, and north of the mall. Some of the old apartment buildings are being torn down and replaced with taller, higher-density buildings, often with commercial uses on the first floor. The mall itself, which is still highly profitable despite being built in 1962, has not changed at all. The plan calls for the mall to be encased in urbanism, with all of the parking in structures. This transformation may take decades. The mall can go on indefinitely as is, but if it wants to expand, it must meet the requirements of the code, Basu says. “The mall is the hole in the donut,” he explains. “But the donut can still function very effectively. This will be a very good addition to our urban form.”

Downtown Kendall is the physical manifestation, on a large scale, of the transformation described in this issue’s Technical Page (see page 14) by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell. To Dover, this transformation is heartening, because it signals that developed suburban commercial areas can be redeemed. “It might be that in Downtown Kendall we are seeing a glimpse of what is needed to grow our way out of the problems of edge cities,” he says.