Community building: lessons for Australia

People don't want to work in faceless office buildings. They want to come down from their buildings and be in real places. Eat at Italian restaurants. Meet their friends. Possibly be able to go home for lunch. The principles of New Urbanism are these:

• Neighbourhood centres on the edges
• Everything within a five-minute walk
• Housing diversity
• Variety of retail
• Schools nearby
• Gradual transition from higher building to lower building
• Parks nearby
• Street networks rather than disconnected pods
• Pedestrian comfort
• Parking hidden (it's important to have some parking visible but we don't have to drown in it)
• Priority for civic sites
• Workplaces nearby

The benefits are civic interaction, social cohesion, pedestrian comfort and safety, higher property values, pride of ownership, independence for seniors and for kids, and housing affordability.

For developers the benefits include market appeal, differentiation, higher prices and rentals, lower infrastructure costs, residual value of retained assets.

But we can't accomplish this with the existing zonings - we have to change the rules.

The Intelligent Community: there are smart places and there are dumb places. Intelligence can reside in a place. An example was seen in Chattanooga where they transformed an old shopping centre into a community place. They started by filling in the parking places. It was a citizen-driven planning process.

Community fundamentals include municipal services, civic institutions, economic development, education, health care, arts and culture, environment, communications, transportation and physical design.

Cities can be green and wonderful. Digging up the creeks that we buried and making them the focus of a community.

Schools are a huge issue. Most people who live in cities and who love cities encounter big problems when it comes to schools. So they move to the "burbs" where the schools are good. The issue between education and transportation is an issue of physical design. It's about making the linkages between the different elements: education and transportation and physical design.

The Intelligent Community over time will be ...

• born in consensus
• with citizens playing a key role in the ongoing shaping of physical forms and laws
• self-perpetuating
• not always easy to get things done

We can now use technology to show people how a streetscape can be transformed. In Hillsborough, New Jersey, which has a population of 30,000, they did an electronic street survey which allowed people to vote on what their streetscape would look like and how much they were prepared to pay. People make very different decisions when they are looking at things at eye level.