don: There’s a full-on New Urbanist movement based upon creating, placemaking, and fighting against the conventional way of building which has been broadly termed “sprawl.” Sprawl is what you all recognize as cul-de-sacs, house farms, faux colonials on an acre-and-a-half with no sidewalks and huge garages. New Urbanists are reintegrating communities and bringing in not only a mix of uses, but a mix of housing types, so we get people of different demographics living together with the idea that a well-designed community with a wide array of people is going to be a much more enjoyable and economically resilient kind of community.

dan: Resilient in what sense?

don: In the sense that the different housing types have the ability for one type to succeed while others are slowing down. There is a term that New Urbanists have borrowed from science that the suburbs that we have created are “mono-cultures.” Mono-cultures are where the whole development is targeted at a specific price range, say between $350k-$400k, with all the same type of house, so if that market collapses the whole thing collapses. That has other ramifications in the social structure of a neighborhood, like the ability to age in place. You come in as a young couple, you rent the apartment, then get a little money together and buy one of the duplexes. After you have kids the duplex isn’t big enough so you buy a single family home across the street. You do all of this in the same neighborhood so as to build lifelong connections. Some of this is idealistic; clearly it doesn’t always happen like that. But even if people aren’t asking or say they are not interested in all that, they will become interested once they enter the fold and they see this internal migration going on.

dan: Doesn’t that speak to a sort of a yearning?

don: I believe people yearn to be a part of a true community

dan: This is exactly what happened at Concord Riverwalk. When most of the people started to explore what their next move was, it was not like they could plug into a Google search for something that would yield “Riverwalk.” I’m always struggling with how we make people aware. I think the yearning is very real and very tangible. And the question is how do you then start to make more people aware that this actually exists as an opportunity?

don: The avenue is finding people who are open to a set of ideas; they are not shopping for a commodity. They are looking for more than a house and know that they want something different.

dan: How do you build, how do you design congeniality?

don: Interestingly it is not a mystical as it would seem. You can’t create a “faux community,” but you can create the structure that would facilitate community. What new urbanism does is try to cultivate the best chance of community happening by balancing private and public space — by doing very particular things, like putting a house closer to the street because it’s in “conversational distance” from the sidewalk. Part of the reason you are sitting on the front porch is because you want to say hello to your neighbor. And if you don’t, you go to your patio in the back.

dan: You don’t need a megaphone from the porch.

don: You design the homes closer together to create a sense of enclosure on the street so that street is an “outdoor room.” It is not just a way to get the car to the garage, it’s the primary public space of a neighborhood. The primary effort is to create a sense that the architecture is cooperating to create a public realm. Often, the normal attitude of real estate development is “it’s all about the house.” We are going to give you all the square footage, the beautiful granite countertops, the media center, the backyard with the huge patio and the barbeque. This is the commodity context, where the value is all about the private realm and prioritizing the house as an object: there is no real thought given to the public realm. The primary value that a neighborhood like Emerson Green is trying to create is that sense of community. What you give up in terms of a private backyard that is big enough to play touch football is a front yard that looks out on a common green where you have a block party. You want to create two things, one you want to create an environment that is enjoyable to walk in and two, you want to create some destinations that are worth walking to.

dan: Yes, the market we found at Riverwalk were buyers who where philosophically tuned into sustainable living. On more than one occasion people arrived at Riverwalk and would take in the whole thing--there was an obvious physical change in their being. I was paying a lot of attention to it. One time I encountered this one woman who said, “I’m in love.” And I was just like, “oh my gosh,” to myself and I was thinking of you and I said, “We really did something here!” We’re hitting people in a really core kind of way.

dan: For her it was the intimacy, the architecture, and clearly something resonated with her on a gut level. For a lot of people they can’t necessarily vocalize it but they know it when they see it.

don: Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

don: Can I tell you, walkability is an amenity that people want very badly.

dan: I want to talk about that for a second. I try to juxtapose New Urbanism against the setting that I grew up in a suburb of Boston that was pretty car-centric with no real train access. I remember feeling as a kid sort of isolated even though I had my neighborhood friends, we’d play capture the flag and would run around through the streets and stuff, but it still doesn’t remotely capture what I think our new communities are doing. It wasn’t until I moved away and visited a walkable neighborhood that was precisely what you said, it had two roads, a park in the middle, houses on either side and garages were back-fed on the alleys. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is unbelievable. Boy, I would have loved to grow up here.” This was exactly what I always wanted. In my suburban neighborhood, all of the homes were focused on the road and driveways. Neighborhoods don’t have to be like this.

don: I’ve always recognized that what we were building in our normal subdivision was deficient. We’ve lived with it so long now that most people can’t conceive of anything else. Especially the level of the planning board, you go to present a traditional neighborhood and they think it’s a radical, it’s dangerous. And you say your highest priced neighborhood in your town a mile away is planned with these exact dimensions — and everyone wants to be there — and you think it’s a radical thing. I think that once buyers compares these walkable neighborhoods to the conventional suburban stuff, they understand the difference and what a difference they can make on their quality of life.

But I think that placemaking runs through the whole thing. Everything from the placement of the street trees—we worked very hard to put the street trees closer to the street—to setting the sidewalk behind a ribbon of grass instead of having the sidewalk right on the road. All of these things communicate a certain character – one that you don’t often get in newer developments.

dan: So, it’s also self-selecting.

don:That’s true.

don: In this case, in Phase One alone, we have at least five building types for 18 residences, plus those have options. You are definitely trying to create a series of homes that appeal to different demographics with the ideal that you design it well and all those different types coexist well. In this neighborhood, the primary amenity is more the neighborhood than the house. So every time you add a different housing type and another interesting piece of architecture you create more of the street and that sense of place.

don: I’ve always said that if you really want to encourage community, give people their own space first. All of the housing projects of the 60’s and 70’s that had this social utopian where you walk out into this common space never work. People retreat. They don’t like to be in that no man’s land. In some ways the porch is literally the buffer between the public and private. If you don’t have that porch, you step out of the front door and you’re suddenly unsafe in a metaphorical way.

don: Robert Frost said, “Good fences make good neighbors.” I think is the truth. On a front porch the presence of that railing and grade change create that ability for a person to go up to the edge and talk to their neighbor.

dan: These homes do serve very well for a retreat

don: They’ll be quiet and comfortable.

dan: Absolutely, the homes are designed to be both. We are going to offer folks the opportunity to get to a net zero possible platform energy which means the homes will have the ability to produce enough energy as they use over the course of a year. In our efforts to get to net zero possible, the homes need to be air tight. Leaking energy,whether it’s hot or cold air, is a big source of energy loss.

dan: I’d be interested in talking about the idea of placemaking and its role in this project.

don: Yeah, I think that plan is about creating at least three different kinds of places, four maybe at Emerson Green. One is the sort of the perfect street in phase one where the houses face each other across a road that’s as narrow as we were allowed to make it. Another is the formal green that is faced by townhouses and the multi-family and that has a different aspect and character to it where you might imagine that there’s a block party or ultimate Frisbee game. The third is the crescent which is off to the far left and that is deliberately, in geometry and every other way, more casual so the houses are set further back and there’s a big lawn that is not as formal and that creates a different kind of place where the homes presumably will feel a little more expansive. And then you have kind of a rural street on the back. The point of all of that is to give every fragment of the overall plan its own character and sense of identity. These are a series of neighborhoods within the neighborhood where someone feels like they belong to that particular little neighborhood. We’ve created collections of 15 or 18 homes that have their own character.

But I think that placemaking runs through the whole thing. Everything from the placement of the street trees,—we worked very hard to put the street trees closer to the street—to setting the sidewalk behind a ribbon of grass instead of having the sidewalk right on the road. All of these things communicate a certain character – one that you don’t often get in newer developments.

dan: I think what’s cool about that, maybe it’s just because of my background in architecture and interest in design, is that I can imagine on a week night or a weekend just sort of walking around to these different places and experiencing the richness and uniqueness of each one of them. It’s all within a relatively tight area. I can imagine that being appealing to people.

don: When you’re designing a small home, it’s not like you can tell someone they can’t have a study because their house is too small. You give them an analogy to a study which might be a little nook at the top of the stairs. You can’t tell them you can’t have a breakfast room, you just design a place that serves that function that’s a fifth of the square footage. You have to have all of the same elements but you deliver them in a much more efficient and charming way, where someone says, “Oh I get it, that’s where I have my breakfast. It’s not the table with six seats around it that I had in my old house but it sits there in the sun and it’s a little nook and it’s perfect.”

don: If homes are designed well, you can do a lot more with a lot less.