Duany's parking garage plan
Andrés Duany’s priorty plan for Obama’s stimulus funding has an Utile-like and typologically-biased clarity:
This is what the CNU should propose to Obama and then lobby for:
Under the category of “infrastructure funding”: The building of parking garages on the 400+ moribund shopping mall sites–on the condition that they be retrofitted into town centers. This would incentivize the private sector to invest in rebalancing them with housing and offices. These are the future town center/TODs that will be the salvation of the suburban sprawl which surrounds them.
This should be the ONE New Urbanist proposition. All of our other principles and ideas ones follow organically from this one. Keep the proposal important. Keep it simple. Repeat it until they get it.
Get the campaign funded by the drowning mall developers who would benefit from it.
Civic Center, project, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Aerial perspective. 1957. Ink on tracing paper, 11 x 14″ (27.9 x 35.6 cm), MoMA.
Traffic Study, project, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Plan of proposed traffic-movement pattern. 1952. Ink, graphite, and cut-and-pasted papers on paper, 24 1/2 x 42 3/4″ (62.2 x 108.6 cm), MoMA.
-Tim