by Peter Gauvin
He may be America's most famous architect, but Frank Lloyd Wright's idea of the American Dream is no longer held in high regard by his successors in the urban planning arena. Wright's philosophy of urbanism emphasized individualism over community--and the car as savior. He once wrote, "Because we have the automobile we can go far and fast . . . houses (can now) be a quarter of a mile apart (instead of) 10 to a block . . . I have always referred to this as the architecture of democracy: the freedom of the individual becomes the motive."
Gradually over the last 30 years, something went terribly wrong with Wright's utopian, auto-driven vision. The consequences of such land-intensive development--the traditional, "Leave it to Beaver" suburb--have become all too familiar: anonymous towns without any sense of community, littered with faceless strip malls, dedicated to (and choked by) autos.
Nationally renowned planner Peter Calthorpe--whose San Francisco firm, Calthorpe Associates, is the design consultant for Palo Alto's Comprehensive Plan update--represents the flip side of conventional suburban development.
Calthorpe is one of the foremost proponents of a rediscovered planning philosophy known as "new urbanism" or "neo-traditionalist development," because it borrows heavily from neighborhood design patterns popular before World War II.
New urbanism emphasizes "urban villages" with public gathering spots and higher-density, mixed-use development (commercial, office, residential, and, in some cases, light industrial) within walking distance of residences and transit stations. It devotes less space to cars and more to pedestrians by choking down streets, creating mini-parks out of parking lots, and putting in more landscaping.
Calthorpe has applied these ideas in the creation of new communities like Laguna West, a $500 million, 800-acre project 12 miles south of Sacramento that he designed for developer Phil Angelides. There, none of the 3,300 homes, townhouses and apartments is more than a half mile from the town center.
On a smaller scale, many of the same principles are being applied to Palo Alto today through the revision of its Comprehensive Plan, a 2 1/2-year effort that began in January 1993 with the establishment of the citizen-composed Comprehensive Plan Advisory Committee (CPAC). The 37-member committee is responsible for creating a blueprint to guide land use in the city through the year 2010.
CPAC has just completed the second of four major phases that will culminate with the document's adoption by the City Council in late 1995. In an unprecedented community outreach effort, CPAC in May held four all-day design workshops that actively involved community members in planning neighborhoods that have change on their doorstep or are showing signs of neglect, which are often symptoms of the failings of suburbia.
Some of the workshops' more popular ideas for change include:
Narrowing Middlefield Road through the Midtown commercial district to make it more pedestrian-friendly and rejuvenate its ailing retail businesses;
Creating public plazas and gathering places in Midtown and on the island between El Camino Real and El Camino Way in south Palo Alto. Both would be surrounded by mixed-use buildings;
Developing transit stations that integrate train and bus commuters with bicyclists and pedestrians. These transit hubs should be within walking distance of commercial centers, and provide such amenities as bike lockers and transit information kiosks;
Providing a free jitney service around the city, similar to Stanford University's Marguerite campus shuttle, that would provide anyone willing to make a short walk access to most residential and business districts throughout the city.
Palo Alto, of course, has been experimenting for years with progressive urban design policies. It has gained wide acclaim for its accommodation of bicycles and creation of neighborhood parks, among other things.
"(New urbanism is) based on the structure that is already inherent in Palo Alto, at least in everything that is north of Oregon Expressway and pre-World War II. That's what people love about the city--the tree-lined streets and human scale," said Senior Planner Virginia Warheit, who has followed the emergence of new urbanism since graduating in 1988 in landscape architecture and city planning from the University of California, Berkeley, where Calthorpe and other notables in the movement have taught.
Warheit said we are all witnessing the "development of a new paradigm for urban planning. The irony of it is, it's nothing new. It's just the recognition of old patterns that were pulled off the shelf and dusted off."
"We're the city these new urbanists come to study. We have understood and appreciated those qualities in Palo Alto for a long time, but we're taking it another step this time," said Nancy Lytle, Palo Alto's chief planning official.
Many of these recommendations are not new, she said. For example, the existing Comprehensive Plan (the city's first), which was approved in 1976 and substantially revised in 1980 and 1981, states, "Wide streets can be narrowed at intersections and landscaped to control automobile speeds and to provide sitting areas and visual amenity."
"What we didn't talk about at that time was how good it is for retail" to slow traffic down and increase an area's walkability, Lytle said.
"This comprehensive plan represents a greater degree of focus (on neo-traditional design principles) than we've had in previous plans," said Assistant Planner George Zimmerman, who retired last Thursday after 29 years in the city's planning department. "We're getting down to a more finite detail, particularly in that area we now call traffic calming . . . In the 1970s the focus was on controlling growth. Now people are assuming that there won't be that much more growth, so they are being more pro-active in deciding site plans."
The 1976 plan was driven and developed largely by the city's Planning Commission, not a specially selected citizen's body like CPAC, Zimmerman noted. The existing plan underwent its last major revision in 1980 and 1981, although it has been amended several times to reflect studies that focused on traffic and limiting non-residential growth in specific areas of the city, he said: the 1984 California Avenue study, the 1986 downtown study, and the 1989 citywide land use and transportation study.
The 1976 plan and its subsequent modifications did contain some new urban design principles, but it didn't focus in a comprehensive manner on the quality of redevelopment, Zimmerman said. "The focus of the Comprehensive Plan has not changed much since 1976, with this update it will."
CPAC originally selected five elements to be studied in the plan's update: the natural environment; housing and community design; transportation; business and economics; and governance and community services.
The committee subsequently decided that an overall review of land-use proposals and their impact to the "sense of community, place and quality of life," particularly in regards to the housing and transportation elements, should be a goal of CPAC. Therefore, in November the City Council approved a hefty and somewhat controversial expense of $185,000 (which included some related expenses) to separate the Community Design element from Housing and add it as a sixth element. That was on top of $507,000 the Council had already allotted for updating the Comprehensive Plan.
"(CPAC is) trying to come up with a better three-dimensional vision through public and private partnership," Lytle said. "People can handle change better if they know what it is going to look like. That's what the Community Design element is about."
Part of the "Vision Statement" of the Community Design element states, "Palo Alto will be an interdependent system of neighborhoods based on the concept of 'urban villages,' each with its own housing, shopping, services, schools and public spaces that are accessible without using a car."
The Comprehensive Plan is a document for "community enhancement," Zimmerman says. But "there are a lot of areas in Palo Alto that don't need any enhancement."
Many suburban aspects of the city are doing quite well and do not face changes through the Comprehensive Plan. "We have examples of everything here, both of the best of urban environments and suburban, and the Comprehensive Plan is trying to preserve and enhance what we have," Lytle said.
"We have glorious examples of suburban neighborhoods that aren't going to change. Stanford Research Park is suburban in style, and I think it works very nicely." (Although CPAC co-chair Will Beckett, who works for Hewlett-Packard, laments that he has to go out to El Camino to get a bite to eat because there are no restaurants in the park.) And Charleston Shopping Center at East Charleston Road and Middlefield Road is another suburban exception doing well as a neighborhood shopping mall, she said.
Peter Calthorpe was born in England but raised in Palo Alto. On his recent return, "he was shocked to find out his own junior high school had been closed and turned into Terman Community Center," said Sandy Eakins, co-chair of CPAC. Eakins can relate to Calthorpe's ideas. She lives in an Eichler in one of the city's largest subdivisions off Louis Road halfway between Oregon Expressway and San Antonio Road.
"The neighborhood has no name," she says. "There's nothing other than houses within a mile, except one elementary school (Palo Verde) and two little parks. The houses are great, but the land-use scheme isn't. There are no gathering places, and the sense of community isn't strong. That's what you get with the anonymity of the big suburban tracts.
"Have you ever noticed that the suburban tracts are named for what's no longer there? Oak Tree Park, Bridal Trail Crossing."
There isn't much opportunity to change this, Eakins admits. There are few if any vacant lots to create a community gathering spot.
Sometimes the smallest improvements can make the biggest difference. The addition of small tables in City Hall plaza has turned it into an attractive spot to have lunch, she said. Providing a place to sit would impact other areas as well. "That's the kind of thing people want."
The community-design workshops dealt with three specific neighborhood study areas that were originally selected from among six areas: the South of Forest Avenue area including the Palo Alto Medical Foundation (which is leaving the area); Hyatt Rickeys/El Camino Real; Edgewood Plaza shopping center near Highway 101 and Embarcadero Road; California Avenue to Ventura Neighborhood; South El Camino Real and El Camino Way; and Midtown. The last three were chosen. A fourth workshop was also held on citywide transportation.
Many of the ideas would mean a dramatic change in land use, urban design and transportation. Here are some of the proposals that had the widest appeal among the workshop participants:
California-Ventura
Boundaries: California Avenue to Fernando Avenue and El Camino Real to the CalTrain tracks
The aim here is to integrate the area south of Page Mill Road with California Avenue and the CalTrain station with better pedestrian connections, workshop participants agreed. Ash Street needs to be completed and Park Boulevard needs landscaping to improve its streetscape.
El Camino should be revitalized by encouraging a mix of retail and professional office space, which could be accommodated in mixed-use or single-use buildings that come to the sidewalk and face the street.
In contrast to Midtown, change in this area is more dependent on private property owners. But with this being the area that includes Fry's Electronics and a 10-acre Hewlett-Packard site that is targeted to be redeveloped, much change is on the horizon.
A majority of workshop participants felt the Fry's site should be used primarily for housing and park space if it is redeveloped for housing. But that's a big if. Although the Fry's site is zoned for housing, the City Council has proposed a commercial-use extension for the property until at least the year 2010, mainly so the city can keep benefiting from the substantial sales tax Fry's generates.
If the HP site is redeveloped, the consensus is it should contain mixed uses of office, retail and residential, with offices placed closer to Page Mill Road and housing facing onto Olive Avenue.
Beckett, CPAC co-chair, advises that "mixed-use doesn't mean industrial space next to day-care centers." It generally means office space over ground-floor retail. "For some reason residential over retail hasn't worked in Palo Alto," he said. "It works elsewhere, but not here."
Midtown
Boundaries: Within a block or two of Middlefield Road between Moreno and Loma Verde avenues
Midtown is believed to be the easiest area to bring about positive change.
"Midtown has many of the qualities of a workable community center," Lytle says. "But something's missing."
Eakins believes it has to do with too much asphalt. "Neither Midtown nor Charleston have nice gathering spots. They're mostly just parking lots."
The consensus is that Middlefield would be narrowed to two lanes to make the street pedestrian-friendly, draw the east and west sides of the commercial area together, and "inspire redevelopment." Its traffic markings and construction with a center-turn lane and median strip probably would be similar to Willow Road in Menlo Park, Beckett said.
"I'm almost certain that's going to happen, because I haven't heard any objections to it," Beckett said. The biggest hurdle, he said, would be the landscaping costs of putting trees down the center divider.
A public plaza would be created as a focal point to the shopping area. Buildings with ground-floor retail and residential uses above would be permitted on the west side of Middlefield. Matadero Creek should be restored to a natural setting, and trails alongside it could serve as a pedestrian/bike connection.
South El Camino
Boundaries: Both sides of El Camino from Curtner Avenue to Charleston Road, and the El Camino Way triangle
How to make El Camino Real friendly to pedestrians? That is the key question in this area.
This area presents some of the most difficult challenges to overcome.
"Few cities have successfully made the transition from strip commercial highway to mixed-use pedestrian-oriented boulevard, and their experiences should certainly be brought to bear in this effort," the workshop report prepared by Calthorpe Associates states.
One suggestion, which Calthorpe strongly advocated but drew skepticism from others, is narrowing El Camino from six to four lanes with a frontage road on the east side with diagonal parking and wider sidewalks. (Similar to the way Shattuck Avenue in Berkeley is configured, Calthorpe said.) The El Camino Triangle would become the centerpiece of the area by creating a central public plaza surrounded by new mixed-use buildings. This latter concept was more universally accepted.
A majority of this workshop's recommendations could be implemented by private property owners, with only limited public intervention and funding.
That could be said of the Comprehensive Plan citywide, Eakins said. "CPAC is not saying the city should put in a tremendous amount of new facilities that would bring in more overhead expenses."
Citywide transportation
Recommendations for improving transportation throughout the city have included putting the CalTrain tracks underground in parts to lessen their presence as a community barrier; extending the Oregon Expressway underpass to El Camino; and dealing with the possibility of Stanford creating a new roadway to Highway 280 from Campus Drive.
There was consensus that things that are now barriers to bicycle and pedestrian traffic can be used to their advantage. Creek right-of-ways should be used as bicycle and pedestrian corridors.
There was also consensus that parking should increasingly "bear a price tag." Recommendations included installing parking meter at urban and civic centers, pay parking at all city sites and residential parking enforcement.
Another proposal is to provide a free jitney service that would make loops through the city on major roads. It might also be a "flag-down" bus that could be picked up anywhere along its route.
"Until you have a truly integrated transit-pedestrian environment it won't be viable," Calthorpe said. He suggested a small bus in some color that would be instantly recognizable and might run on alternative fuel such as compressed natural gas. To be successful it would have to run frequently and not keep people waiting, he said.
Beckett encourages people to get involved in the Comprehensive Plan. It's not too late, he says. "This is a draft and we want people to participate. Things will not change overnight," he said. "The document's purpose is to move toward certain trends."
CPAC is holding a community outreach program this month and encourages comments on its Policies and Programs document, which is available for review at the Planning Department and city libraries. For more information, call the Planning Department at 329-2441. The next CPAC meeting is Aug. 18.
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