Talk:Ladera Ranch, California

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[edit] New Urbanist communities category

Ladera Ranch is an example of New Urbanist planning principles. What reason is there for removing it from that category? Dystopos 17:40, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

  • Agreed.
  1. The neighborhood has a discernible center. This is often a square or a green and sometimes a busy or memorable street corner. A transit stop would be located at this center.
  2. Most of the dwellings are within a five-minute walk of the center, an average of roughly 2,000 feet.
  3. There are a variety of dwelling types -- usually houses, rowhouses and apartments -- so that younger and older people, singles and families, the poor and the wealthy may find places to live.
  4. At the edge of the neighborhood, there are shops and offices of sufficiently varied types to supply the weekly needs of a household.
  5. A small ancillary building is permitted within the backyard of each house. It may be used as a rental unit or place to work (e.g., office or craft workshop).
  6. An elementary school is close enough so that most children can walk from their home.
  7. There are small playgrounds accessible to every dwelling -- not more than a tenth of a mile away.
  8. Streets within the neighborhood form a connected network, which disperses traffic by providing a variety of pedestrian and vehicular routes to any destination.
  9. The streets are relatively narrow and shaded by rows of trees. This slows traffic, creating an environment suitable for pedestrians and bicycles.
  10. Buildings in the neighborhood center are placed close to the street, creating a well-defined outdoor room.
  11. Parking lots and garage doors rarely front the street. Parking is relegated to the rear of buildings, usually accessed by alleys.
  12. Certain prominent sites at the termination of street vistas or in the neighborhood center are reserved for civic buildings. These provide sites for community meetings, education, and religious or cultural activities.
  13. The neighborhood is organized to be self-governing. A formal association debates and decides matters of maintenance, security, and physical change. Taxation is the responsibility of the larger community.
Ladera Ranch has most of these characteristics. Sincerely,  Short Verses  (talk) 18:22, July 16, 2005 (UTC)
Ladera Ranch is not new urbanism and does not claim to be. Its street and block pattern is highly disconnected and hierarchical, with cul-de-sacs predominating. Most residences are not within walking distance of mixed use (although the distances to schools are reasonably good). Many residences are not even within walking distance of the private clubs. Portions of the development are gated and therefore removed from the public realm. None of the organizations that maintain comprehensive directories of new urban developments -- the Congress for the New Urbanism, The New Urban News, and The Town Paper -- list Ladera Ranch.
Ladera Ranch does feature a variety of attractive house styles and types, green building features, an extensive trail system, and more mixed use than is usually found in suburban developments. It is a hybrid of new urban and conventional suburban characteristics. LaurenceJA 00:53, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
  • It's obviously not a strict implementation of canonical New Urbanism, but it does lean heavily on practices brought back into planning discourse by the New Urbanist movement. More can be said about Ladera Ranch by elaborating it's relationship to New Urbanism (as evidenced by this page and 136 Google results for "ladera ranch" + "new urbanism") than could really be said outside of that context. Perhaps the most productive thing to be done is to move some of this discussion of Ladera Ranch planning back into the main article and then revisit the categorization. Dystopos 03:07, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
Most of the pages returned by such a Google search note the hybrid character of Ladera Ranch. I should mention also that Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric Region (2005), the definitive reference book on new urbanism in the Los Angeles region, also does not include Ladera Ranch. There are a great many hybrid developments in the U.S., possibly as many as there are new urban developments. The TND Design Rating System is a set of standards designed to draw distinctions along that spectrum. LaurenceJA 13:27, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
  • Are you, in fact, the author of the TND Design Rating Standards? My initial impression is that using such a tight analysis to filter "true" new urbanism from "hybrids" is bound to involve POV. Nevertheless, these references seem to be, as you say, definitive. I won't continue to challenge the recategorization. I think a discussion of Ladera Ranch's relationship to New Urbanist principles would still be useful in this article. Dystopos 14:53, 17 July 2005 (UTC)
All rating systems involve POV, if only in the choice of standards if nothing else. It’s especially true in the field of urban design which is a blend of art and science. The important questions in this case are: Are the standards transparent? Do they provide sufficient guidance to give reasonably repeatable results? And finally, do they identify places that have the desired benefits of new urban design?
I also like the idea of an open, online system for rating many neighborhoods -- a survey system to tap into the wisdom of crowds. The main thing you’d need is a way to identify the criteria you base your judgments on. And then for users, a way to select the criteria they’re interested in seeing. LaurenceJA 00:07, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
    • There's a distinction to be made between "rating" and "categorizing" here. Even a bad example is an example. So, no, it's not particularly pertinent in this case to ask if the places "have the desired benefits of new urban design" - it is more important that they drew planning principles from New Urbanism. But anyway, I think you've shown that Ladera Ranch, good or bad, is not a particularly strong example, and need not be categorized as a New Urbanist community. Dystopos 01:42, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
There is new urbanism that is good in some respects, new urbanism that is bad in some respects, and there is development that is not new urbanism. Evaluation is required in order to classify. LaurenceJA 10:55, 19 July 2005 (UTC)