Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities

190 Pages·2007·5.616 MB·English

by  Patrick M. Condon

Design
Charrettes
for Sustainable Communities
About Island Press
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Design
Charrettes
for Sustainable Communities
Patrick M. Condon
Washington • Covelo • London
Copyright © 2008 Patrick M. Condon
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of
this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from
the publisher: Island Press, Suite 300, 1718 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20009
ISLAND PRESS is a trademark of the Center for Resource Economics.
Libraryof Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Condon, Patrick M.
Design charrettes for sustainable communities / Patrick M. Condon.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59726-052-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-59726-053-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Cityplanning.2. Community development, Urban. 3. Sustainable development. I. Title.
HT166.C62135 2008
307.1'216—dc22
2007025913
Printed on recycled, acid-free paper
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my grandchildren Toby Mallon and Reese Condon, and to all the other children of
their generation—a generation whose hopes rest profoundly with our own.

Table of Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction 1
1. Charrette Theory for People in a Hurry 5
2. Two Kinds of Charrettes 17
3. The Design Brief 35
4. The Nine Rules for a Good Charrette 56
5. The Workshops 69
6. The Charrette 81
7. After the Charrette 112
Case Study One: The East Clayton Sustainable 125
Community Design Charrette
Case Study Two: The Damascus Area Design Workshop 140
Appendix 159
Endnotes 163
Index 167
View of a typical neighborhood in Vancouver, British Columbia. North American city dis-
tricts built prior to 1950 were characterized by an interconnected and often highly regular
street network organized around commercial streets that connected and served neighbor-
hoods. Trips to destinations are always via the shortest practical route due to the short block
length and the absence of dead-end streets.
Preface
Fly over anyNorth American metropolitan region and look out the window.Two
different cities lie below. The city built before 1950 is instantly recognizable. It’s
where the streets are in some form of grid or interconnected web, and where com-
mercial buildings line the main arterial streets—the Broadways, the High Streets,
and the Main Streets of towns.The sizeof the urban blocks (a blockbeing anypiece
of land completely surrounded by streets) is almost universally about 4 acres of
land in rectangles of roughly 600 x300 feet. Inside each residential block there are
usually dozens of individually owned rectangular parcels, sized between 1,500 and
6,000 square feet. Typically, each parcel has one building on it, usually, but not
always, occupied by one family. If you look carefully enough, you can see separate
entrances on some of these structures, signifying the existence of more than one
dwelling in what must be a duplex, triplex, or fourplex structure.
As you look down, you can also see that a larger arterial street stands out from the
otherwise uniform grid every six to ten blocks; you can see most of the larger com-
mercial or institutional buildings strung along these streets. From the air, these com-
mercial streets are visible as relatively pronounced threads in the generally uniform
and continuous urban quilt of the city.It is the weave of the larger quilt that you see,
not the separated pieces in it. Studying the scene carefully, you realize that these com-
mercial streets are rarely more than a 10-minute walk from any home.
Still scanning this world from 10,000 feet, we see an unusual amount of activity
at certain key crossroads in the grid. Commercial buildings line not just the arterial
streets, but also spread to surrounding blocks. These areas of intense commercial use