Session 13: Livable Communities: The Natural Environment and the Built Environment
Monday, December 3

Major Themes to Be Covered

1. Families rely on their communities to invest in the infrastructure that supports all families living in that community. This includes investments in affordable housing and improving the environment, public health, and quality of life. Examples are safe neighborhoods, clean water, clean air, power supplies, road and transportation systems, parks and open space.
   
   

2. Communities also play an important role in connecting their members to the natural environment by creating spaces for families to recreate together in safe and secure parks and open spaces.

3. Public parks, open spaces and cultural amenities provide essential opportunities for children and young adults to develop and respect our diverse cultural heritage. These benefits include physical health through active play, sports and recreation; social development through cultural activities and team sports; reduced idleness and crime among teenagers, and educational opportunities for children and adults.

4. Public parks and open space contribute to the environmental quality of the urban or suburban environment allowing children, families, and seniors to spend leisure time outside the home in an active education environment. Public spaces offer opportunities to appreciate community life and landscape, to get to know about other people and their neighborhoods.

5. Areas of cities, which are neglected by community governments, become places of blight and disinvestment. Vacant lots become trash heaps, homeowners move away and a more transient population moves in. These areas become breeding grounds for criminal activity and drug addiction further alienating people from their place.
   
   

6. Linkages between environmental quality and public health are becoming increasingly clear. Residents of blighted urban areas suffer from the effects of living in a poor urban environment. Fear, filth, vermin and crime are enemies of community making as well as being hazardous to health.

7. Urban agriculture offers many benefits: community cohesiveness is reinforced; children are enriched; the elderly and the infirm can benefit; and even small garden plots enhance overall quality of life in a community.

8. Sprawl is a concern of urban, suburban, and rural communities alike. But, promising strategies are emerging to address this issue. Communities are organizing to revitalize "brownfields" and bring them back into productive use.

9. New tools, like the "Principles of the New Urbanism" developed by the "Congress for the New Urbanism" are providing information and guidelines to communities, architects, and planners that enable them to improve the built environment and therefore community life.

Students Will Learn

1. Why there is a mis-match between the needs of families and the local provision of parks and cultural resources, and how communities could become more involved in creating new parks and retrofitting antiquated parks.

2. Why the built environment is important to support affordable housing, transportation and road systems, and clean water and air.
   
   

3. The origins of Sprawl and what communities are doing to address this.

4. Tracing the dynamics that created contemporary urban spatial patterns and the planning and design theories that have guided public interventions in the built environment.

Required Readings

Duany A., Plater-Zyberk E., Speck J. 2000. Suburban Nation. New York: North Point Press. Chapters 1-3.

Jacobs J. 1993. Death and Life of Great American Cities. Vintage Books. Chapters 1-3.

Suggested Readings

Barnett J. 1982. Zoning, Mapping, and Urban Renewal as Urban Design Techniques. New York: Harper and Row. Pp. 57-75.

Carson R. 1994. Silent Spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Jacobs A. 1985. Looking at Cities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Pp. 30-83 and 99-107.

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