And a Strip Miner Shall Lead Them
CNN reports that Kennecott Copper is developing a large (144 square miles) parcel of currently undeveloped land in southwestern Salt Lake Valley. Among the features of this development:
- No garages on the fronts of houses--they're all back in the alleys
- Lots of parks--within a five minute walk of any home
- Village "centers" with shops, grocers, restaurants, etc., again within a five minute walk of any home
- Front porches on most homes
- Miles and miles of walkways and bicycle paths
- No aluminum siding or fake cobblestone veneers on homes
- Connections to the center of Salt Lake City by highway and light rail
As you can expect, some of the builders Kennecott invited to bid on the project "rolled their eyes" and walked away from it. I guess they're too busy building McMansions.
But, what a great idea! To make an urban community that's pleasant to live in, convenient without the use of that gas-guzzling behemoth SUV--it's almost unheard of outside the left leaning coasts.
The shame of it is that for the past 60 years the heirs to the Mormon pioneers, who built an intermountain empire on the bedrock of community, have instead been building on the shifting sands of self-centeredness, and it took a gentile strip mining corporation to reintroduce community to the Wasatch Front.
posted by Mark Butler at 12:03 AM
1 Comments:
There's a book called The New Urbanism which covers this movement of the same name. It has examples of other communities being built around the US with similar principles. There was one being built in Iowa City. And recently the NYTimes wrote about this happening in Lancaster Co. so a certain ratio of farmland/housing development could be maintained. I'd like to see more of it. Even more desirable would be more in-fill-- that is, revitalization or rebuilding within cities, instead of adding to the continuing outward expansion.
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