20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 16

  (Cheeky graphics by Telegram staff but town green clearly visible.)

In September 2008 I wrote a sort of generic good walkable urban design article just as the world was about to collapse. My main point was that we could create town buildings that formed great urban spaces and each building may be used in any number of ways. And that specific function buildings like libraries and gyms could be used by many ages and at all hours so we didn’t waste money and space on having a different one of each for each age group.

Here's the article as it appeared in the Maine Sunday Telegram:

Special to the Maine Sunday Telegram Insight section:

Close To Home

Copyright 2008 Michael Belleau

Get in the minivan and drive to school to drop off kids. Drive to work. Drive back to school to pick kids up. Drive to soccer field for kids practice. Drive to grocery store. Drive to music lesson. Drive to everything.

Until now, we have located all our daily activities on the basis of driving to them. All of our decisions were based on how much driving time it took. When building a soccer field location was determined by how many minutes drive it was for the most people. When locating schools we looked at how long a trip it was for buses. When purchasing a home we looked at how long a drive it was to school and work. All the talk of building village communities with open surrounding land and the, ‘New Urbanism’, movement did nothing to impact potential homeowners from purchasing the best house and lot for the money they had regardless of whether it was in town or not. Even the sustainability movement could not change the power of best-lot-for-money and drive time equation.

Now things are changing.

We are trapped. We buy hybrid cars. We still drive them in frantic pick up and drop off routines and time consuming stressful daily circuits of pavement. Much of our time is spent chatting on cell phones while driving, hoping to get some joy from conversation while stuck in a discorporate (out of body) space. Fat, stressed and isolated we feel happy to be a part of the culture but strangely out of sorts. Something doesn’t seem right.

Now is probably the time to bring the sustainability movement, the new urbanism, the cost of oil, and our own unease together to return to a pedestrian way of life.

Imagine waving from your front door as you children leave to walk to school. Imagine if the soccer practice was a 10-minute walk from home. Imagine walking by the grocery store on your way home from the field. Imagine during that walk you were accompanied by another parent also walking home! Our whole automobile centered living paradigm must change.

We can start by creating neighborhood zones using the 10-minute walk as our maxim. Luxembourgian architect Leon Krier who had studied the work of the Austrian Camillo Sitte forcefully propagated this urban design concept. By locating elementary school, library branch, post office, sports field, grocery store, YMCA, etc. in each neighborhood, our lives are made simple and sustainable.

Schools are most easily taken on as the state could mandate this. By taking a facilities-centric approach we can create flexible places for the community. If you have a neighborhood gym then children can use it during the day and other community events at other times. As number of children changes the rooms used for classes can be used for other things if facility is considered part of the neighborhood’s available space. Middle and high schools can be located within a longer walk- slightly longer for middle (15 minutes?) and substantially for high school (20 minutes?).

Similarly with the library, we can discard the old precedent of having one large municipal library where all printed matter is stored as if we are still using it as the only source of information. Branch libraries can be small and staffed by few with a small children’s books section and one-day delivery of interlibrary books and videos for others as well as internet terminals and an expert on information retrieval on hand. Audio and video books could be distributed with mp3 devices loaned out. These places can have the latest technology for those who have older technology. If this is part of a neighborhood building then meeting space can be shared and the elementary school can use the same library.

Post offices should be just a stall staffed by one in a neighborhood building with people in a hurry going to the central city one.

Grocery stores are market driven but can be encouraged through town incentives. If people are creating pedestrian traffic, the market will respond and partner with town planners.

Sports fields are multi-use and best located in each neighborhood. This may require eminent domain but at fair market price they are well worth having in each neighborhood for obvious reasons. Fields can be used as parks, sport fields, town squares, and community activity hubs. Retired people can sit and watch games and wildlife. Saturday vegetable outdoor markets can be there. This is the single most important space from an American culture point of view and we need to have large spaces for this in each neighborhood.

Now, whether a YMCA runs the community exercise facility or the municipality does, this type of gym, pool, exercise space can be in a community building along with other facilities so that space is shared and not locked into single program ownership; a facilities-centric approach. By leasing these spaces to the Y for community programs we can avoid complicated bureaucracy if that becomes an issue (just as mail is best left to the federal post office).

Now no one can make people move into neighborhood centers and leave the open suburban lots behind but if we work together as a state we can get the infrastructure in place for healthy sustainable lifestyles. This old bumper sticker of mine I found the other day says, “If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.”

If the state leads, eventually the people will follow.

Michael Belleau is principal of Michael Belleau Architect in Portland Maine. He has written articles on urban design in Maine for this paper previously and can be reached at www.michaelbelleau.com

Next I'll discuss the break with traditional icon oriented, or object oriented city/town facilities thinking.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 11

Picking up from where I left off in the last post regarding my 1997 urban design article in the Maine Sunday Telegram titled, "A Sense of Place"- 

While living in Camden I noticed a new high school was going to be built 3 miles out of town so I wrote an article in 1997. Camden Maine was an amazing little town with the town hall, police, fire, library, schools, Y, town landing in town. The current school was in town and almost all the kids walked to school and walked down to bagel shop and over to the Y in town for swimming or sailing and lived a wonderful holistic life. The new state of the art school would mean all would have to be bussed to and from and parents would have to drive them everywhere. I thought the existing old mill building right in town over a stream with high ceilings and lots of space would be perfect if they moved the credit card telemarketing company out (that company eventually did leave). I said Portland school stayed in town. They built the new Y out of town too so the kids couldn't just walk there for lessons, etc.

Speaking of walking I had time to write this for a few days as I was lying in bed barely able to move after injuring my back somehow during basketball game. Another anecdote is this time is when my first son began to walk and holding his hand we would step down the granite blocks along the stream and bay.

After the article the state did start looking at schools staying in walkable areas so perhaps my urban design work began to have an effect. It's always hard to tell as I've never been contacted by any state or municipal planners, etc. regarding any of my articles.  

Quoting from the end of the article: An exchange student from Switzerland was interviewed recently regarding her experiences so far in the United States. She said it was so different, all this rushing around by car to run simple errands. In her village, people walk. ``Things are so hectic here,'' she said. ``We move a lot slower where I come from. My house is closer to everything there, and it's new to always have to drive somewhere. We don't even have school buses there.''

Where was she? Los Angeles? Miami? Some New Jersey suburb?
She was in Camden, Maine.

Here is the second half of the article 'A Sense of Place' as published in spring of 1997:

In the future we will have access to unlimited alternate realities in 3-D video. Access to our institutions, such as libraries, town offices, police, fire department and even schooling may come through the video world. From a purely pragmatic view, there will cease to be a need for many institutional buildings. Based strictly on the numbers, we might say that life will be more efficient without them.
But no matter how many tasks we can accomplish with the computer or how entertained our children can be by one, we will always desire to be around people for a certain amount of time each day. How many of us go into a shop after work just to be around people, even if we don't need to purchase anything?
Therefore, our institutions might simply change to fulfill needs that are not based solely on function. The library may be a ``quiet zone''; the police station will contain a ``safe zone.'' We can develop our public spaces based on emotional values.
In Orono, I lived across the street from the road up to the high school, so I walked to school. The high school in Orono contains the public library. The building sits behind the middle school, which sits behind the police/fire station/town office building, which sits on Main Street.
After school we could walk into town, and maybe go to Pat's Pizza or LaVerdiere's. The institutional buildings were all placed in town because it was common sense to do so. We must use common sense when placing our institutions in the future.
The zoning laws we write are the rules by which developers play. Any time we see a building go up that does not fit our concept of what our town should be, we have only ourselves to blame. The rules we write are the basis for the creation of our towns, and we need to incorporate goals that are in step with the experiences we would like to have in moving by foot through our town. These rules should incorporate networks of experiences such as the movement from library to school; from town hall to post office; from police station to town hall; from shops to school, etc.
When we plan our public institutions around automobile traffic, we place the comfort of a large piece of metal over our own comfort. We try in vain to have a meaningful conversation in five seconds as we pick up a burger at the drive-through window. And while our cars sit comfortably in their spaces, we wander aimlessly through seas of asphalt to complete simple chores.
In Camden, the best place for a new high school may be smack in the middle of town in the old mill now used as offices for a telemarketing company. That company with all its commuters may in fact be better off at the proposed high school site. That would make common sense.
An exchange student from Switzerland was interviewed recently regarding her experiences so far in the United States. She said it was so different, all this rushing around by car to run simple errands. In her village, people walk. ``Things are so hectic here,'' she said. ``We move a lot slower where I come from. My house is closer to everything there, and it's new to always have to drive somewhere. We don't even have school buses there.''
Where was she? Los Angeles? Miami? Some New Jersey suburb?
She was in Camden, Maine.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 10

Returning to Maine from London where I had studied at the Architectural Association, we settled in Camden where my first son was born in 1995. Camden is an idyllic small town with a thriving Main street and cozy harbor. In Camden the kids walked to school for the most part and then downtown and to the Y and bagel shop. Parents could let them get there by themselves. Children could walk out the door in the morning and go to school, hang out after, go to swimming lessons, etc. all downtown and walk home for supper. Then I saw they were going to build the new high school 3 miles out of town. Now everyone was going to bussed to everything.

Here is the first half of the article 'A Sense of Place' as published in spring of 1997:

It's three o'clock in the afternoon and Camden's village center is full of kids. The library, the parks, the churches, the YMCA - institutions all clustered in the village center - begin to fulfill their roles as stages for the next generation's concept of who they are - where they're from.
Each morning, children clamber onto bicycles or walk the short distance to school, which is centrally located. Buses reach out to gather those living on the periphery. This ritual, repeated over and over, becomes one of the strongest identity factors in each child's life: ``I am from here; this is my street; this is my path to school; this is my town; this is my place to play hackysack.'' Although we live in the information age, some things, like our senses, never change.
When it came time to expand Camden's library, the town didn't think, ``Hmmm, let's sell this old landmark and build a new library on a greenfield site a couple of miles from downtown, where square footage costs will be low and vehicle circulation will be optimal and there will be plenty of parking.''
No, the thinking went more like, ``How can we add the space and preserve the character and enjoyable space outside as it relates to the town as a whole?'' Priority was given to strengthening the quality of the village concept. This respect and commitment to the idea of village was so strong that the new library wing is actually underground.
Now Camden and its surrounding towns are going to build a new regional high school on a greenfield site three miles from downtown. It will be a wonderful school and everyone is very excited about it. Many of our new schools around the state are being built at similar locations. This is logical, given the need for a large building, for large amounts of land for athletic fields and for easy access for buses, which will be necessary for transporting so many kids who used to walk to school.
But it occurred to me that something precious will be lost. And will continue to be lost unless we put our heads together and come up with some solutions.
On the one hand, each new facility built on an open site on the outskirts of town will function very efficiently, with one building, ball fields and bus traffic all taken care of.
On the other hand, the car appears to have won. Traffic engineering would appear to be the most important factor, along with square-foot costs, in deciding where to build a school. Almost all the kids attending the school will be bused in, or will arrive by private automobile. The same criteria that govern the building of suburban malls by private developers appear to have been applied here. No more stepping out of the classroom and into the town square; the kids will line up at the curb waiting for rides home.
BASED PURELY on the numbers, the greatest need in planning a new school is classroom space, followed by athletic fields and traffic. The classroom space can be easily accommodated in any town, if the state would support efforts to keep our kids in the town center and therefore strengthen our town identities. As for the athletic fields, they can be located at various places and used by everyone. Imagine everyone in town playing on the town green surrounded by some of the institutional buildings we all use.
As long as we allow decisions to be made on the basis of pure numbers, the way life should be is in trouble. Slowly, we are disassembling our towns piece by piece. Soon, no discernable town will exist, only traces: ``That building used to be the post office. That police station used to have a town hall next to it.''
Our tendency to see a building as an object alone and unique keeps us from seeing the relationships between buildings, and between us and the street space. We then continue to build our buildings standing alone, heroically fulfilling their only purpose, be it school, library or town hall, without also forming a part of a greater whole called the town.
Several spaces come together to form the experience we call a town. And several spaces come together for each child and us as we move from front door to school or library or town offices or five-and-dime. In today's world disorienting gaps appear in our spatial experiences when we suddenly change from walking down the sidewalk to hurtling through space at 50 mph to sitting in a room some distance from home. We need to create wonderful town spaces to reconnect ourselves to our surroundings.
In Maine, high school is not merely a step on the road to a bright future. Each town's high school is a container for the town's living history. The basketball games are dynamic events to be cherished and discussed for eternity. The identity of each town is formed in large part by the stories from events occurring in the schools. Our high schools are in many ways our most significant buildings, and perhaps in our should be placed in the center of our towns.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 9

Continuing from my last post, discussing my 1992 fall article on Portland Maine's downtown and the mall, I was discussing how Portland's peninsula pedestrian brick fabric was a great lure as all the mall was not.

You get the idea, everything downtown was historical, craft, emergent, regional, experiential. We had weather and very high quality urban experiences to use to draw people in. In fact both the mall and downtown could grow together by being opposites.

Here is the second half of the article as published back then:

Growth guidelines

Back in the city, lets’ establish a few guidelines to planning:
-Rule number one: Never build more than 10 subsidized housing units in one place and allow at least one mile between those places. If you create hell, you get hell, not a big surprise.
-Rule number two: It’s OK to bust up hell. Eminent domain and public redevelopment are OK in areas with profound social problems, but not in others.
-Rule number three: Design as if you made $8.50 an hour and had a wife and two kids. If you blow a head gasket your finances are shot for a year. But if you had a bike path and a light rail system to help you get around then things will be OK and you needn’t be too upset.

A “bread and circuses” policy would emphasize free outdoor concerts and festivals, skating on the pond and other activities that make life for your family delightful without costing you money. A beautiful city is part of that policy.

Now we can work on the orchestration of the beautiful city.

Let’s envision Portland as a city where a light train carries people from the mall to Union Station and back. Bike paths link surrounding towns with the city. Automobiles arrive at high speed along I-295 and at medium-high speed along Franklin Arterial, Washington Avenue, High Street, State Street and St. John Street.

-This brings us to rule number four: Where two paths intersect, each carrying a different load, the less powerful load is not interrupted. Therefore, Franklin Arterial, High Street and State Street are moved underground at their intersections with Congress Street.

Vital central avenue

Congress Street, as the city’s spine, will control and support the experience of being in Portland. 

First, a continuous running trolley moves from Union Station to the Eastern Promenade and back. The whole street is pedestrian oriented, with the area from High Street to Franklin Arterial pedestrian only.

As development occurs, pedestrian-only sections of the street are added. Streets such as Cumberland Avenue, Free Street and Federal Street- re-established across Franklin Arterial- are designed as delivery streets to support Congress Street.

Plaza-to-plaza mapping can start at Congress Street with the existing Longfellow-Congress-Monument squares used as a base. With Franklin Arterial underground at Congress, a new Franklin Square could be the next plaza. Other new plazas could appear at Union Station and at the intersections of Congress with Deering Avenue, North Street and the Eastern Promenade. 

In this pedestrian-oriented city, the streets running parallel to Congress Street would be service streets, oriented to motor vehicles. Beyond the service streets, more plazas could be established along the second streets down from Congress such as Spring Street (west of High Street), Middle Street and Oxford Street (re-establish across Franklin Arterial).

The system of alternating pedestrian-only and service streets could be altered to create pedestrian-only parts of Fore Street and Exchange Street. Commercial Street could accommodate both autos and people. More plazas could be established on the water.

The establishment of plaza could proceed along these lines: The city identifies intersections as good locations for plazas in a master plan. When activity picks up enough at one of these intersections, merchants petition for the city for “plaza” status. A contest is held to create a sculpture that celebrates some aspects of the city and is built with city funds. Lamps, benches, trees, and brick or stone paving are installed by the city, usng a different design for each plaza.

The key to successful Portland is activity along Congress Street. As I drove along the street one night recently it was dark and no one was around. The feeling of being in a city at night with no people in sight was very unsettling.

We need to provide incentives that will encourage development of appropriate nighttime activities. These businesses include hotels, restaurants and theaters.

Stores would be encouraged to remain open later if police foot patrols and hotel-restaurant-theater activity gave people a sense of security during the evening. A new convention center close to Congress Street would help.

I hope this article has stimulated dialogue and revived dormant ideas. It is possible to build the path of least resistance, both physically and emotionally.

20 Years of Urban Design in Maine 8

1992 Maine Sunday Telegram article.

Before leaving to study in London, still in the 92 recession, I felt that if everyone loved the mall then downtown could grow by emphasizing how it was the exact opposite. That if the mall was a hermetically sealed indoor private conditioned shiny auto destination then downtown could be promoted as an outdoor, brick sidewalked pedestrian wonderland. So I wrote an article published in the Insight section of the Maine Sunday Telegram in the fall of 1992 while I was starting studies at the Architectural Association in London.

Maine Mall object in empty sea of parking vs. Portland waterfront spaces between buildings.

Here is the first half of the article as it appeared:

Downtown, mall can feed each other

By Michael Belleau copyright 1992

Two sources of energy dominate the relationship between Portland and the communities that surround it: downtown and the mall. By understanding the source of each one’s energy, we can begin to understand how the city relates to its suburbs and find ways to help the city grow.

The mall is a product of the suburb, itself a product of our love of nature, our distrust of the city and our drive for self-sufficiency.

Self-sufficiency is at the core of our collective conscience, and the single-family home and single-owner car are its means of expression.

Once we were all independently driving around, we needed a place to drive to. First came the drive-in, followed by the supermarket, and finally the mall, where we can do our shopping in one comfortable location.

Now the easier-to-park-at-and-more-comfortable-with-everything-you-need mall has wholesale warehouses springing up around it, providing us with the lowest prices. Nearby we find office parks to centralize our activities further.

All are guided by the maxim: Easy to get to. The mall’s powerful lure is predicated on the use of the car to run errands: a definition of suburbia.

The city has historically been a place where we could walk through the streets from shop to shop to run our errands. But now it is easier for most people, who live in suburbs, to shop at the mall.

The city has become a place for doing business, a place for people (mostly young) to get to know each other. It is a place to find graphics centers, banks, and bistros for schmoozing.

It is easier to find a good restaurant in the city. It is easier to find cultural events and attractions. It is easier to experience beauty in built form, as you are walking or sitting. And it is easier to strike up a conversation in the city, because you’re probably not in your car.

The city’s power lies in culture and human interaction, with man-made buildings and plazas its stage.

For Portland to grow in the future it must copy the mall in some ways and strive to be opposite in others.

If the mall is easy to get to, then Portland must be easy to get to as well. If the mall has public toilets, pedestrian-only streets, is well lit, and has security patrol, then downtown must also have these amenities.

On the other hand, if the mall area is ruled by the car then the city can emphasize the pedestrian. A light-rail link between downtown and the mall seems to be the ideal solution to the mall-downtown equation. The mall area is for cars and parking; the city for people and walking. Bother are for bicycling.

By building brick by brick, a pedestrian dreamscape in the city, the city will strengthen its natural source of power. Not only can it emphasize culture, but also intimacy, the kind of day-to-day interaction with others that the suburban lifestyle has nearly eliminated. And, with a little ingenuity, it could compete on the mall’s home turf: shopping.

The city can never compete with suburban shopping centers for wholesale-priced business unless city stores can move the merchandise to the customer’s house by delivery. Then only a showroom is required, and the customer is free to roam without bags.

Next we need to make roaming the city fun.

Escape to the city

As the mall area grows into a behemoth of endless parking lots and warehouses, signs of varying degrees of loudness act like a thousand television commercials simultaneously screaming for our attention. Driving through this zone we become anxious, confused and physically taxed. The city can offer relief.

Let people hop on a rail line or bicycle and come into town to shop amid a complex of beautiful plazas and pedestrian-only streets carefully orchestrated to provide the most soothing experience.

Conversely, for the mall area to strengthen the city as the opposite face of the same coin, steps must be taken to boost the source of its power: the countryside.

The mall area now is an anarchic free-fire zone that is rapidly dissolving into an anywhere-USA-but-most-likely-New Jersey. Residents of South Portland and Scarborough may wish to think about the identities of their towns and how they would like their towns to look in the future. A good theme for development here could be “A peaceful drive through the countryside.”

City Center Streets for Bikes & Pedestrians

Currently we are on the cusp of the movement to convert our streets from automobile only to "complete streets", those that fully accommodate all modes of transportation. This means the creation of bicycle lanes first and foremost. These bike lanes are best made as separate from auto lanes with barrier to get parents with kids and the vast majority of people who will bike to feel comfortable. This means more width sometimes in street section and more infrastructure.

Of course this is wonderful to get the kind of dedicated bike lanes like Copenhagen has but perhaps in city centers we should think about how wonderful narrower streets feel to walk down and that it may be best to turn the street lanes in city centers into bike lanes. A gradual shift from sitting in a high speed vehicle to pedaling to walking as primary mode of transportation can follow the gradual shift in urban fabric from isolated building in countryside to tight walkable medieval pedestrian street city centers.

Sometimes its better to skip the intermediate step of building for current trends and save money by just converting what we have bit by bit.

Park(ing) Day Portland Maine 2013

Once a year in September in cities around the world Park(ing) Day is held to celebrate alternatives to automobile centered urban living. From the parkingday.org website: 

"PARK(ing) Day is a annual open-source global event where citizens, artists and activists collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spaces into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public places. The project began in 2005 when Rebar, a San Francisco art and design studio, converted a single metered parking space into a temporary public park in downtown San Francisco. Since 2005, PARK(ing) Day has evolved into a global movement, with organizations and individuals (operating independently of Rebar but following an established set of guidelines) creating new forms of temporary public space in urban contexts around the world.

The mission of PARK(ing) Day is to call attention to the need for more urban open space, to generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of urban human habitat … at least until the meter runs out!"

I designed and built an installation in a parking spot in front of the building my office is in. As our public spaces are teetering on irrelevance due to the domination of the automobile for mobility and the television and computer screens for public forums, there is certainly a need to promote urban spaces. 

My installation titled, "Piazza", creates a scaled down urban space of the sort common in medieval city centers. Buildings with no gaps between them form blocks which create streets and plazas in the space between them. My installation creates benches as blocks which are free to be moved about as they interlock to a piazza flat surface where your feet rest. This micro urban experience is a great instructional tool for children and adults who may not have lived in Venice or the Old Port.

Together we can promote these urban spaces and raise the quality of our Maine living experience and the health, community and sustainable benefits which go along with these environments.

Outdoor Pedestrian Mall Still Car Centered

On a recent car journey we had to stop to pee and pulled over in Hingham at this strange mall. The stores were all exterior accessed like a main street. Side by side chain stores with wood siding look and wide enough sidewalks bordering a sea of parking. Everything felt like Disney World with all familiar chain stores placed as if on main street except there was no street. Not even a pseudo town green for the storefronts to look across at. Just a giant lot of parking. Hence the vastness of the distance between one very long line of storefront to the opposite side indicated processing large crowds in a way. The incongruence between the desire to imitate a pedestrian friendly main street experience and the desire to place as many cars as possible as close to everything created an uncomfortable tension for me as a lover of urban space. How was it the developers missed the boat? Cars placed behind or to the side could have allowed the space across storefront walls to contain a town common or pedestrian street. This, although still removed from the town center and a auto accessed mall, would have at least created a true "place". Note to developers: please contact me or other urban planners to help you make places people will frequent for hundreds of years and not just 10 or so. We all want the same cozy pedestrian friendly town experiences. People actually like the surprise of parking and walking, turning the corner, and coming upon a fantastic street filled with activity!

Imagine if that giant parking space with buildings around it were much smaller and green and trees and the parking was behind the buildings (very well lit with very safe feeling)?

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7RwwkNzF68

Very good movie on the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth". Great explanation on failure not due to single cause as our cause-and-effect western cultural conditioning would have us believe. There were many factors and maintenance was one of them. We are trained to look for single remedy for an ailment and we do same with social problems. Hope some day we see the interconnectedness of the social fabric.

The "slums" were cleared away for boulevards or later, 'modern' blocks and either way, we look back to see the building fabric was usually fantastic, only the maintenance was bad. One day a block of flats is 'poor', and the next, 'rich'; with no change to the buildings other than upkeep. 

In this movie, a project usually held up as the symbol of modern residential architecture's failure to be humane, turns out to have failed for reasons other than style or form. Must viewing. 

New Urbanism in Maine

I just attended a New Urbanism workshop here in Maine. Our practice site was a small town in Maine and 20 or so participants all came up with unique ideas to the sketch problem. Within the rules of thumb there were an infinite number of possibilities and a few things stand out as quite pertinent to our state's situation.

1. The better we can concentrate building to the smallest area as in traditional villages (as in pre-industrial Europe), the more money we save. Now this is key to our situation as town's need a big carrot to help them get citizen's on board regarding creating a master plan which benefits all. The more buildings are concentrated in the town center, the less money spent on infrastructure. The less money spent on infrastructure the less money spent on energy. The less money spent on energy the less damage to our planet. And the more we concentrate our buildings in the town center the more our municipal spending can go towards high quality sidewalks, trees and plazas rather than spreading our funds over a vast area with minimal place creating.

2. The more we concentrate building to the town center the safer our lives become for kids and retirees. If you are a kid and run around and play and visit your friends you are being watched out for all the time in a packed neighborhood. If you are a kid and are walking to your friends and crossing pedestrian friendly streets you are physically safer than biking down a highway or walking down a road with no sidewalks. And you don't need a ride from mom or dad to play. Retirees do better and are more independent if they do not have to drive to everything.

3. Subtle shifts in our roads make drivers slow down. By shifting residential streets at intersections a bit from directly across from each other we make through traffic less speedy. Same applies to bending roads a tiny bit here and there. The medieval town with it's roads from old cow paths are more interesting and safer than the perfect grid.

4. The more we concentrate buildings in a small area the more beautiful and productive the surrounding landscape is. Farmers are allowed to make a profit if there land is zoned so as not to allow a development or taxed very high if development is outside the designated town center so land is used more efficiently, again, saving everyone money. And community gardens are a must as we all attempt to feed our families in times that can be very bad or very good economically thereby stabilizing our children's lives.

5.  The more concentrated buildings are in town centers, the less parking we need to build and the more money we save. This seems counterintuitive but one of our instructors, a traffic engineer, pointed out that in Portsmouth, because everything is concentrated, people only need to park once and walk around to everything. Therefore, they do not need to find a space at multiple spots in town to get to all the places they are going. This is important information for planners and citizens.

In conclusion, master planning for our towns is key to living a cheaper, safer, more interesting, more beautiful and more stable life for all!