Above: Forest Hills Gardens
One thing I found disheartening upon visiting middle-America was how one cannot really walk anywhere at all — a car is the only way, not only because it’s a big place. There’s a lack of design in that respect. Every establishment and every place is sprawling and independent of every other place. The only unifying design in a town or city tends to be the road that invariably runs through it. There’s no sense that the place has evolved a unique character through centuries of planning or even trial and error.
Apparently there is a growing desire for so-called “walkability” in the more cosmopolitan areas of America. Slate has a nice slideshow-based essay about Forest Hills Gardens, a concept town built 100 years ago in NY State whose well designed community schematic never really caught on back then, but may offer solace in a more health conscious contemporary America.
What makes Forest Hills different from—and much better than—most modern suburbs is not just the density, walkability, and architectural variety. It is also the attention to detail, whether in Olmsted’s planting strips or Atterbury’s distinctive street lamps. The designers understood that one of the great challenges of building a planned community from scratch is creating an instant sense of belonging. They achieved this by harmoniously integrating planning, landscaping, and architecture. That may be Forest Hills’ most important lesson: Community building is an art. Not a pictorial art, but an experiential one, appreciated when you walk through the dark arcades of Station Square, beside the shaded town green (where a person sat in a deck chair the day I was there) and along the looping curve of Olmsted’s greenway. This is not merely planning or building; it is place-making.