The more I learn about urban planning, the more I know I have to learn. I recently read Suburban Transformations, by Paul Lukez, a Boston area architect. He describes an approach to planning he calls adaptive design that attempts to define a more organic approach to development. I will post a review in the next few weeks as I digest this more thoroughly.

I also read Jane Jacobs classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a relatively ancient text from the early 1960s that is often cited as one of the most influential books in urban planning. It's an amazing book, written with a voice that is devastatingly passionate and witty. The themes she talks about, specifically her central thesis that cities are systems of organized complexity and therefore represent a different type of problem than can be approached with mere statistics, is a transferable battle to the present day. The same types of mistakes in thinking she railed against in the 1960s continue to clutter and hinder our progress. I loved this quote as she delivers a final summary criticism of the conventional wisdom assumptions driving most planning in the 1960s:

...it is harder to understand why this form of arrested mental development should be passed on intact to succeeding generations of planners and designers. It is disturbing to think that men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be "modern" in their thinking, conceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.

She cautions early on that you cannot apply the analysis of cities to town and suburbs. So I'm not going there. But it got me to thinking about where our Town of Westwood is going in a larger context. We are a town, clearly. But we are not quite the town I grew up in. In my hometown of Smithfield, VA, you could not go to the grocery store without running into someone you knew. The teachers had all taught most of the kids' parents. It was a very small town of about 3500 people. Westwood is about 14,000 people...but we are 13 miles southwest of Boston, so we are part of the Boston Metro area. However the town is still very rural in character and there are no big office parks, etc. so it does not feel like what I think of as a suburb.

That is likely to change with the Westwood Station project. This mixed use development is the largest of its type ever and appears to be a poster child for smart growth. I welcome the idea that it will boost the growth of the town, but many residents are very concerned about the traffic it will bring. The phrase that caught my fascination in the description of Westwood Station was "mini-city," the idea that it would be like planting an urban seed in our town, to grow a new social, cultural, and commerce center in the town. I envisioned an evolution over my lifetime where this project not only anchored its shops, restaurants, office and residential space, but became a new cohesive center to a small city of Westwood.

But I think the more accurate term for what is to be created is "Edge City." And historically, "Edge City" does not have positive connotations. They are sterile, minutely planned commerce and employment centers that isolate and are isolated from the town that existed before. Their shiny new facades rise from the once pastoral landscape and at night, the gates are closed and the city shuts down; its temporary occupants drive their cars out the feeder roads, back to the random towns in the metro area and beyond.

I think Westwood Station is trying hard to avoid this, but who really knows what will happen?

Several months ago, Gerald Nealy, of Baltimore InnerSpace, blogged extensively about several developments around Baltimore that he describes as Edge Cities in the making. It's the kind of analysis I wish I was qualified to write about our own Westwood Station. And there are many articles about Smart Growth to digest, like this piece by Robert Goodspeed who talks about gaining grassroots support for Smart Growth policies.

I think the alternative to growth is stagnation, so I am supportive of the project. I do wish there was more discussion of the vision behind it and some way in the community to think about this as more than just a tax revenue source or traffic magnet. Time will tell the fate of our growth.